October 26, 2009

Album review: BEAK> - 'BEAK>' (Invada)

Portishead man and The Horrors' mentor strikes again

7 / 10 Geoff Barrow cuts an uncompromising figure. His tenure in Portishead since the early ’90s has singled him out as a man unwilling to play the media game, instead letting the music speak for itself. It seems fitting that he’d do the same with BEAK>, an exercise in pecking at the boundaries of experimentation and testing the limits of restraint and the aural senses by recording live in one room. Combining the efforts of Matt Williams, aka Team Brick, on keyboards and Fuzz Against Junk’s Billy Fuller on bass, it’s hardly surprising there’s a doom-like quality to BEAK>’s debut, as heard on the cacophonous ‘Ham Green’, the brooding ‘Blagdon Lake’ and the caustic in-joke of ‘Barrow Gurney’. Submissive this is not.

Ash Dosanjh