Beach Slang
THE CRACKING NEW ALBUM FROM BEACH SLANG ALMOST DIDN’T EXIST. BUT IT DOES, AND IT’S BRILLIANT, AND IF NOTHING ELSE, IT’LL MAKE YOU DESPERATE TO TEST-DRIVE AN EPIPHONE DOT.
The product of a mind so sharp and distinctive – that of frontman (and sole remaining founder) James Alex – Beach Slang are one of a select bands who don’t even need to sell listeners on the music their records contain, merely because the titles alone do it perfectly. Case in point: The
DeadbeatBangOfHeartbreakCity. You read those six words on a record jacket and you’re immediately roped in. It’s poetic; political; powerful. You ask yourself, “What could such a gut-punching string of buzzwords possibly sound like? I need to buy this record and find out.”
Okay, so maybe that exact scenario doesn’t happen in this current age of Spotify and instant gratification – but you just know that if Beach Slang were kicking 30 years ago, they’d have a solid slew of fans earned via curious crate-digging alone. And as Alex attests, their curiosity would be rewarded, because TheDeadbeatBangOfHeartbreakCity is best surmised by its buzzy title.
“Y’know, it has this sort of reckless abandon and tenderness to it,” he rhapsodises. “I like that sort of sleazy poetry. When that lyric came out of me when I was writing the song ‘Bam Rang Rang’, right away I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s the title of this record.’ It feels like a full-body spit in the face of sadness, and I think I needed that. I needed to feel that lift, because in the off-period we had between this record and the last one, I was really starting to unravel in this sort of weirdo downtime.”
“I just started to come undone,” Alex admits. “I was asking myself, ‘What is it that I do if I’m not playing my guitar?’ But I think it felt nice to sort of figure myself out inside of all of that confusion. The title was a product of that: it was like a lonely snarl. It just fell out of me when I was standing up in my little room at home, trying to write this record and bash out all these chords. I just spit it out in this stream of consciousness, and when I looked back on it, I was like, ‘Woah, where did that come from!?’”
Alex is one of those songwriters who – like many of us can relate – cracks under the weight of boredom. Beach Slang’s debut album, the agile and angular ThingsWeDoToFindPeopleWhoFeel
LikeUs, crash-landed on the punk scene at the tail of 2015; less than a year of back-to-back touring and aggressive self-promo later, they followed it up with ALoudBashOfTeenageFeelings. That it took almost four years for HeartbreakCity to materialise seems downright unbelievable. But especially after LP2 gathered such an impassioned response from its fans, Alex had a cardinal epiphany: BeachSlang3 would make or break the band, and rushing it would almost guarantee the latter.
“There was this fear that we were burning people out,” he admits. “We were offering so much stuff so quickly, it was like, ‘How much more of this twochord schlock do people need?’ I wanted to take a little time and learn a third – maybe even a fourth – chord. This thing matters so much to me and to the people that have connected with it that I just didn’t want it to be burned out. I didn’t want it to be one of those things where it burns bright and then it’s suddenly over. And then the second part of it was that schlocky thing – I didn’t want to be pumping out xerox copies of my own shit.”
It’s a struggle many artists find themselves entangled in at a certain point: “Where am I going with this?” It’s imperative for creative growth to build on your sound and take it in new directions, but for a lot of us, that’s a lot easier said than done. Readers can (and should) look to 2018’s EverythingMatters
ButNoOneIsListening – a lowkey reinvention of Beach Slang’s catalogue released under the moniker Quiet Slang – for an example of how Alex reckoned with that struggle. In a bid to nudge himself out of the comfort zone he’d established with the first two Beach Slang records, he completely reworked the formula of their contents. Because if he couldn’t write an album that stood apart from them – at least at first – disseminating their markup would be a fruitful exercise.
“I felt that records one and two were sort of a related narrative,” Alex explains, “And I think that if I had done anything else along those lines again, it would have been cheating, y’know? So I took a step back, as a songwriter. And then I probably wrote, like, five different versions of [ TheDeadbeatBang
OfHeartbreakCity] – just figuring out, ‘What the hell do I really want this to be?’ All those songs I threw away, it was like I was burning it down just to build it back up.”
To finally beat his four-year bout of songwriter’s anxiety, Alex looked way back, before Beach
Slang even existed. “I went back and listened to everything that turned me on when I was coming up,” he says. “It was punk rock, classic rock, new wave, folk, pop – I just absorbed all of that, and that’s when it sort of clicked. It should’ve been obvious from the beginning – I was like, ‘I’m just going to write some big mushy love letter to rock
’n’ roll.’ And that’s what [ TheDeadbeatBangOf
HeartbreakCity] is.”
If there’s one thing that will never change with Beach Slang, it’s the presence of Alex’s iconic whiteand-gold Epiphone Dot – a guitar so imperatively synonymous with his playing that to see him without it feels like something has to be wrong. Its brash and biting lead tones can be heard on virtually every one of the band’s tracks (it’s even the focal point of the
HeartbreakCity cover art), and if Alex has any say in the matter, that won’t change anytime soon.
“I’ll go down with that thing for sure,” he chuckles. “They actually just rebuilt me another one – I beat the hell out of the other ones so much that they built me another one to make sure I wouldn’t have to play a show without it. It’s just my thing, man! I’d feel like Superman without a cape if I played something else!
“It has this robustness that I just don’t get when I play on a solidbody electric,” Alex continues. “I’ve used a full hollowbody before, and that was almost too big – I felt like I needed to grease my hair back and play Brian Setzer songs or something, y’know? But then with the Dot, it just felt perfect. I could hit it and it had this really big, fat tone to it, but it still had the bite of something like an SG. It melded those two worlds that I dig so much, and the action on it just feels so… We were just meant to fall in love, y’know? Cupid shot the arrow and it nailed the two of us together. It was meant to be.”