Conventional wisdom say that major chords convey happiness and minor chords convey sadness. One of my professors in college, however, once said that he thought there was nothing sadder than a basic major chord. Few songwriters in rock ‘n’ roll—generally a blunt and primitive genre when it comes to using harmony to express emotion—possess the sophistication and skill to make a G major chord sound emotionally complex when played on a crunchy electric guitar. And the Beths’s Liz Stokes is one of them.
Stokes has been churning out expert power-pop songs for a few years now. The Beths’s 2018 debut, Future Me Hates Me, explodes with catchy, cathartic hooks, while the Auckland-based band’s 2020 follow-up, Jump Rope Gazers, introduced some darker emotional shades and, occasionally, slower tempos to their repertoire. The group’s third album, Expert in Dying Field, is an exhilarating power-pop tour de force, replete with bristling guitar riffs and bright, infectious harmonies. It’s also a devastating exploration of anxiety, insecurity, and regret—a reflection of how, in life, there can be no true joy without sadness.
Expert in Dying Field consolidates and builds on the Beths’s previous efforts, offering cracking rhythms and deft melodicism that still manage to accentuate, rather than obscure, Stokes’s confrontation of her inner demons. “Silence is Golden,” for one, contrasts Stokes’s desperate yearning for some measure of peace and quiet with the fastest, noisiest backing track that the Beths have made to date. “I’d burn the whole city down to turn it down,” Stokes growls, the anxious thoughts buzzing around her head evidently loud enough.
There’s even more power-pop onomatopoeia to be found on “A Passing Rain,” wherein a gentle arpeggiated opening riff mimics the pitter patter of water on a windowpane and soon builds to a torrent of heavy guitar as Stokes wonders if her penchant for emotional breakdowns will eventually drive her partner away: “You tell me sweetly/You wouldn’t have me any other way/You’re not a liar, but I can’t believe you/When I’m in this.”
Even if you just want hooks, there’s plenty of those on the album. Jonathan Pearce’s production is clean and immediate, emphasizing the band’s trademark multi-part harmonies and Benjamin Sinclair’s basslines, which have all the kick and fizz of a good rum and Coke. It’s enough to make the album’s cheeriest cut, “When You Know You Know,” sound like a lost mid-’90s alt-rock gem.
Beneath the veneer, though, Stokes’s writing is incredibly heady, rivaling even the recent output of Courtney Barnett, a fellow Oceanic singer-songwriter who blends snappy popcraft with soul-baring lyrics. Stokes repeatedly returns to her self-doubts. On “Knees Deep,” she magnifies her hesitation to dive into a chilly pool on a summer day into the apotheosis of her chronic timidity: “I am a coward turned to stone/I stay there for centuries/So all of history knows about it.” And “I Told You That I Was Afraid” is even more blunt in its distillation of the singer’s insecurities: “I told you that I was afraid/That everyone around holds me in some secret disdain.”
Because the hooks just keep coming, Expert in a Dying Field never feels nearly as lugubrious as some of the lyrics might suggest. Indeed, Stokes’s melodic instincts are such that it’s sweetness, rather than gloom, that often comes to the fore. The album is bookended by songs about ended relationships: The first, the title track, portrays a romance at its tail end, while “2am” is a woozy, insomniatic recollection of good times long gone, as if half-remembered from a dream.
But Stokes doesn’t sound bitter. On “Expert in a Dying Field,” her voice glides smoothly into her upper register, producing an oddly soothing effect as she ruminates, “And I can close the door on us/But the room still exists.” She can’t just lock those painful, messy parts of herself away, as they’ll always be there. As Expert in a Dying Field deftly displays, however, she does have the unique ability to transmogrify them into rapturously catchy rock songs.
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