BEAK>
Harmonic presents
BEAK>
+ guests
Tickets on sale now priced €16.50 (including booking fee) from www.whelanslive.com www.tickets.ie www.ticketmaster.ie & Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. 0818 719 300 – Republic of Ireland customers 0844 277 4455 – Northern Ireland customers 00353 1 456 9569 – International customer
“Everything about Beak> is a cohesive, ambitious and thoughtfully-executed murky delight. A godsend of a record in these times of landfill indie.” Drowned in Sound 9/10
“Menacing and paranoid, this second album makes satisfying sense in 2012, and even leaves you grateful to live in a chaotic world.” NME 8/10
“Beak>’s second album was recorded in just one afternoon – quite a feat given that mainman Geoff Barrow is better known as one third of Portishead, who have managed just three albums in 18 years. The results are impressive, if disconcerting, as they build on Portishead’s noirish textures and – with vocals buried so deep in the mix as to make them unintelligible – take a turn for the darker. Yatton and Elevator throb along on pulsing motorik rhythms; Kidney sounds like Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth; while slow-burning standout Wulfstan II exudes brooding menace. It makes for a record that’s heroically uncommercial, but hypnotic nonetheless.” – The Observer 4/5
“Anyone familiar with Portishead’s magisterial Third and Barrow’s production on The Horrors’ Primary Colours knows the terrain-metronomic rhythms stretched like elastic; percussion as precise as surgery; disembodied keyboards and vocals.” Q Magazine
BEAK> formed by Geoff Barrow of Portishead alongside Matt Williams and Billy Fuller in 2009 recorded their self-titled debut album in Bristol, created out of 12 days of improv sessions and then edited into song form. Shorty after releasing it on INVADA records UK and Ipecac records U.S., the band went on a successful tour, playing various festival dates across Europe and the U.S. Buzzing from the tour, Beak> then returned to the studio to start work on ALBUM 2 only to find that the time on the road had taken its toll on the band’s delicately sensitive and creative nature. And, by consequence, had turned them into a truly awful-sounding pub prog-rock band. The magic had gone. It seemed that the band were thoroughly moribund. Until… One rainy afternoon in Bristol after many tortured, truly terrible recording sessions something changed. It may have been the diesel fumes from the bands tour splitter bus had worn off, others say that the band simply turned their amplifiers down. We will possibly never know the true events of that afternoon but the band began to play and, once again as before, their bleak, wobbly anti-blue note sound had returned, but this time with added synthesizers.
And so… recorded in one room live (with very few overdubs) Beak> >> is upon us.
Bristol band BEAK> will hit the road in support of their second album >> freshly released on their hometown label Invada. To coincide with the news, Invada have released details of a special edition fabric boxset of the album which includes a bonus disc of 10 previously unreleased tracks from the >> sessions. That will be available only on the November tour and a very small limited number from the Invada site now: www.invada.co.uk/beak
LISTEN
TICKETS
€16.50 available online from WAV Tickets [Lo-Call 1890 200 078] (50c per ticket service charge applies on phone or creditcard bookings)
AFTER THE GIG
Whelan’s Indie DJ from 11pm til late or you might even catch the end of the weekly Trad Session in the front bar (9pm, Free).