Combining a barrage of various inane sound effects with equally varied music, The Beta Band has conjured up a pastiche of soundscapes that defies categorization. The UK band has released a combination of their three EPs before formally introducing themselves with a debut album, "The Beta Band." Sadly, the epic beauty of songs like "Dry the Rain" are absent from their first proper album, but the band's lighthearted, humorous twist to their melodies and subtle white-boy rapping provides an amusing look into their zany studio adventures.

Despite the chaotic stringing of ethereal sound effects throughout the album, the band's characteristic hip-hop pop rock sound is still evident. "The Beta Band Rap" is a pastiche of musical genres, segueing into each other with irrelevant sound effects. A perverted "Mr. Sandman"-like melody provides a background for the track, while a barbershop quartet commences crooning, eventually giving way to a rapping hip-hop story of the band's album deal, which itself gives way to a rockabilly tune topped with mumbling lyrics a la Elvis. "Dance O'er the Border" highlights croaking vocals and a hilarious homemade rapping background delivered with amusing oral sound effects while cowbells ring and bongos thud in the air. "The Cow's Wrong" has beautiful choral harmonies singing along to a classical piano piece, but it's beauty is offset by the juxtaposition of haunting vocal loops that give the track a chaotic, dramatic edge, sounding "high on the wire," as the lyrics suggest.

The Beta Band's debut album seems like good experimental fun, but there's a perpetually fine line between ingenuity and ridiculously extemporaneous cooking in the studio that overshadows creativity. It's nice to amuse yourself while recording, but it's also nice to make seriously good music.

- Aileen Torres, preamp.com

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"There's just an enormous amount of information out there and it's inevitable that people want to make things out of the torn part off of something else and put it with theirs. I think it's a natural creative process."-Tom Waits

"Dry The Rain," the opening track of The Beta Band's The Three E.P.'s, sounds like the slide guitar on the second half of Pink Floyd's Meddle mixed with the loose and funky drumkit of Beck's Mellow Gold and the inspirational lyrics of John Lennon; "If there's something inside that you want to say/ You can say it alright/ I will be alright/ I will be O.K."

While listing the Beta Band's apparent influences might be fun, it would detract from the main point. These four guys from Scotland and England have got the tact of jazz musicians. They put together songs with a bare minimum of ingredients to create a huge presence. They use the space between notes and around the percussion to let the reverb play off the walls or to let the whole song expand inside your head.

Songs like "B+A" and "Inner Meet Me" sound like a cathedral during a mass in which the congregation has acid tabs on their tongues rather than communioun wafers. The combination of organic samples of birds and water, turntable sorcery, folky arrangements and synthetic gurgles is truly engaging. The underlying bass drone on "Push It Out" is so low it's likely to make you fear for the structural integrity of your house. The main elements that pull all of the songs on this compilation of their first three, now extremely out of print, EPs are the lilting vocal harmonies and complex chorus-stacking. You'll want to sing along, I guarantee it.

Like The Beatles and Dylan, the Betas have the capacity to write songs that are almost skeletal and yet somehow seem unapproachable in terms of being recreated. Their tendency to embellish around a one-chord, acoustic guitar drone is a beautiful match to all that goes on percussively in songs like "Inner Meet Me" and "She's The One." It's this same sort of drone-with-variations-turned-pulsing-entity that makes early Stereolab records so appealing.

In short, this release is the vibrant and exciting beginning for a group that isn't afraid of drawing from sources far and wide. If you're looking to induce summer a little early or just haven't heard anything truly innovative in a while, pick up this record, take it home, pop it in and goddamn it, plug in those headphones.

— Larry Davidson

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Enter the domain of pop discourse and you will find that the term 'mad' has been debased beyond usefulness. In actual fact, mental illness and a career in rock tend to be mutually exclusive. Charles Manson is mad. Mansun, on the other hand, are quite patently not. Madness, crazily enough, are sane. And so on. Were The Beta Band really as demented as conventional wisdom dictates, they could have landed a sponsorship deal with Britain's leading straitjacket manufacturer by now. As it is, their record company has compiled the Anglo-Scots quartet's three EPs into an album, prompted by black market exchanges of up to 40 quid for the originals. Now that's mad...
Of course, it all boils down to the poverty of imagination in the post-Britpop compost heap that anyone not clunking out refried versions of early Supergrass B-sides while calling themselves The Tearaway Tossers must be, a priori, bonkers. From what one can gather, The Beta Band are a pretty disorganised bunch, accident-prone and fond of giving free rein to their anarchic impulses. Some of them went to art school, apparently. Yet the lasting impression left by 'The 3 EPs' is just how reassuring their cosmic folk slop tastes. Granted, this a wildly eclectic brew, and midway through the 15 minutes of 'The Monolith' they do metamorphose into Funkadelic as heard through a distressed radio speaker inhabited by hermaphrodite gnomes, but it's hardly 'Beta: The Asylum Years'.

Indeed, what makes The Beta Band such a powerful proposition is their ability to pervert the traditional campfire ballad in myriad ways, without appearing contrived (hello Gomez, and, if you please, goodbye) or losing its kernel of warmth. Collectively, these 12 songs leave you gasping, not only at the frenzied sense of enterprise but also the combustible emotional depths therein. Even an item as ostensibly flip as 'Dog's Got A Bone' ("all of his own") fathoms an inchoate sob: "Can't help this feeling of feeling so alone". 'Dry The Rain' encapsulates the typical Beta duality in its first verse: "This is the story of my life/ Lying in bed in the sunlight/Choking on the vitamin tablets the doctor gave in the hope of saving me". The lighters-out chorus seals this most bittersweet of homegrown symphonies.

Heard in one cumulative wedge, the leap from the primitive 'Champion Versions' debut through 'The Patty Patty Sound''s pawky psychedelic dub and up to the spooked avant-pop of 'Los Amigos...' is dramatic and suggests a group still assimilating the magic at their fingertips. In less than 12 months Steve Mason's woebegone mumble has assumed seriously mournful qualities on 'Dr Baker'. Meanwhile, 'Needles In My Eyes' opens with a snippet of live seagull action before its organ-driven tale of narcoleptic doom evolves into an unobtrusively beautiful song, like REM had they decided all those years ago to stay weird.

It's early days, of course. But on their latter two EPs alone, The Beta Band have dared to turn pop convention on its head, lather the tired old beast in hot buttered soul, and still emerge utterly groovy. If this is madness, pass the medication.
Rating: 8

- NME Music