by Chris Liberato (@chris_liberato)
photo credit: Sarah Gilsenan
Michael Beach has an imminent date with a swimming pool. It’s a “rippin’” 105 degrees where he is, in Merced, California, visiting his parents in the house he grew up in. The 41-year-old rocker and songwriter is hunched forward in an office chair, staring at me intently through his computer screen, the summer sun blazing in through the window behind him. With his long, curly head of reddish hair, lanky frame, and white collared shirt buttoned all the way up, he’s instantly recognizable. It’s a look that adds a little extra intensity to his live performances — not that they need it.
“We’ve been living in the pool,” Beach tells me about how he’s been spending his week. He’s traveled with his partner, artist Sarah Gilsenan, and her nine-year-old daughter to Merced from Melbourne, Australia, where he’s been living on and off since 2005 (he became a citizen in 2021). The plan was to visit his parents for the first time since the pandemic started, and spend a family holiday in their time-share beach house on the California coast. But the day before Beach and his loved ones arrived in the U.S., his mom got Covid, and as he puts it, “that plan just went to hell.”
Beach ran into some similar setbacks making his latest record, the eight-track, nineteen-minute-long 2022 EP, recorded during and around Melbourne’s record-setting nine-month lockdown. “Every time we went to rehearse, someone got sick or a lockdown would happen, and it was just impossible to get momentum, you know? I hate making excuses, but that’s why it’s an EP and not this cohesive full-band, ten-song thing,” he says, referring to the fact that all four members only play together on two tracks. But while the EP’s brevity, and the fact that it’s less of a group effort than he would have liked, might be frustrating side effects of the pandemic, Beach is quick to remind me that the period wasn’t entirely without its upsides: “The last couple of years had some unpleasant times, but there was plenty of joy in there as well. It’s good to try and strike a balance.”
Strike a balance, the 2022 EP does indeed. Like Beach’s last two solo efforts (2021’s Dream Violence and 2017’s Gravity/Repulsion EP), he artfully arranges the songs, executed in a variety of musical modes, to form a patchwork kind of whole. Two blown-out, head-nodding, Neil Young-in-a-basement type rockers— his specialty, some might say — drive the first side, the guitars pushing even deeper into the red than usual thanks to new second guitarist, Bonnie Mercer. While the second side offers up a pair of quieter singer-songwriter numbers, including the piano-led “Only A Memory,” a duet with The Necks’ Lloyd Swanton and Beach’s most refined composition to date. Stringing the four proper songs together are a series of instrumentals, mostly short ones, that spin off in unexpected directions and help create a mini-album experience similar to Gravity/Repulsion.
The instrumentals are named for the band’s four members: “Bonnie’s Shadow,” “Carla’s Cicadas,” “Mick’s Dream,” and “Pete’s Harmonicas.” “I think the idea probably started with “Pete's Harmonicas,” explains Beach of the track named for drummer Peter Warden, his “oldest and closest musical ally” who he first played with in the early 2010s in his primal and explosive first band, Electric Jellyfish. The track is an attention-commanding, 17-second burst of harmonica blows that quickly devolves to resemble a pair of shortwave radios struggling to pick up a frequency. It’s a typically clamorous performance by a man whom Beach first encountered playing pots and pans in a band called Cult of the Placenta Head, a Wolf Eyes-like noise outfit. “I don't care what the band sounds like, we just need to get that guy in it!” Beach recalls about instantly wanting to collaborate with Warden.
Expanding on the concept behind the 2022 EP’s instrumentals, Beach says: “Pete's and [bassist] Carla's tracks were really easy, and I definitely had to deliver on the idea because, I don't know if you've listened to Bonnie Mercer’s stuff, but she's a badass.”
Beach’s reverence for his bandmates, and others who inspire him, is something that comes up often during our conversation. He never passes up the opportunity to sing someone’s praises: “Bonnie's one of the coolest guitar players in Melbourne and just one of the coolest people I’ve ever met,” he gushes about Mercer. “She does this doomy, textural feedback-y stuff. You go to shows and everybody wants to take pictures and videos of her guitar playing.”
Kicking off the EP’s second side, “Bonnie’s Shadow” is a snippet of Mercer’s tonal experimentation for what she plays on the following track (“Have You Ever?”), a series of squalling, feedback-y notes that have been digitally manipulated by Beach. The effect is something like Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” with a head rush, making its way across the room via slow, wobbly-footed steps before realizing it might need to sit down for a minute.
Beach has known Mercer, like Warden, since his Electric Jellyfish days when she was playing in the improvisational psych-bashers Grey Daturas. But the idea of asking the “in-high demand” guitarist to join the Michael Beach group wouldn’t come until after his 2019 US tour, when Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch from Goner Records labelmates Thigh Master left to focus on that project, and Beach suddenly found himself down a guitarist and a bassist. He wanted to keep his band a four-piece and make it gender-balanced, something he now considers non-negotiable. But most of all, he says, he wanted it to be a cohesive unit.
Beach remembered collaborating with Mercer in 2018 when no-wave pioneer and avant-composer Rhys Chatham brought his 100-guitar orchestra to Sydney. She was one of the Chatham-appointed “sub-commanders” tasked with directing, among others, Carla Oliver — his other new bandmate — and him, seated opposite each other in one of the orchestra’s many angled rows. “Without knowing each other, we had to be really locked in,” says Beach about clicking with Oliver under Mercer’s direction. “We just had this sort of vibe.”
He also remembered that Oliver and Mercer already had a bit of a friendship, so he decided to spring the idea of joining his band on them. Thankfully they said yes, which has provided Beach with a cheeky line to spin about the lineup’s inception: “Sonic Youth formed in [no-wave icon Glenn] Branca's group, but mine formed in Chatham's.”
The chemistry of the lineup is obvious from the second you press play on the 2022 EP. Opener “Out In A Burning Alley” finds his and Mercer’s guitars leaving the proverbial starting line like a couple of go-karts vying for position, squealing and driving their weight into each other, wheel against wheel. Hot stepping around the chaos is Oliver, nimbly hammering away on her bass, while Warden bashes his kit with a rumbling insistence. Pretty soon, one of the guitars peels off with a showboating whoosh as Beach lyrically sets the scene: “I was out in a burning alley / with only my mind to surround me,” he sings, almost a little too casually considering the scenario he’s just described. There’s a deceptively light, almost celebratory feel to the song (his compass points, he recently said, were a Saints-style guitar tone crossed with a Peter Laughner rambling narrative). At the same time, the tone is brash, lit up and buzzing, pumping you up to persevere. “We were down, but we kept on believing / In the redemption of the early morn.”
Thematically, “Out In A Burning Alley” is classic Michael Beach in that the song’s narrator has reached a kind of breaking point. It’s a trope that appears in one form or another in some of his best work, such as when he sings about losing hold on reality in “You Were A Mirror,” or being unable to put his feet flat on the floor in “A Vision of Modern Love.” “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Beach is quick to reply when I inquire, somewhat vaguely, about this idea. Warden refers to it as the “sense of desperation” that pervades his friend’s songs, which is a phrase that really resonates with Beach. “As soon as he said it, I was like ‘Yup, that’s definitely in there!’”
“Desperation, madness. I see it reflected everywhere,” explains Beach about the presence of these feelings in his music. “If there’s one thing that’s making sense to me in the way that society is right now, it’s that everybody’s at a breaking point.”
The pervasiveness of these feelings presents an opportunity for Beach to connect with listeners, which is one of the things he values most about songwriting. “Whether I’m about to go broke, or about to be sick, or whatever it is. If I can communicate that in a song, I feel like the average living person will probably be like ‘Oh yeah, me too. I’ve got that too! That sort of connection is important to me.’”
Beach has a knack for communicating urgent emotions not just in words, but also in sound — especially tone. “I really love that "Societal Breakdown" guitar tone,” he tells me about the fittingly unstable, saturated sound at the heart of the EP’s other full-band rock song. It’s the product of a garage sale amp, a Phillips 1950s PA that had been “home-jobbed” to mimic a Goldentone, a classic Australian brand of amplifier. He picked it up second-hand, of course, while recording with Justin Higgins (of the bands Eat Skull and Lavender Flu) years ago in Portland, Oregon, a city and music scene known for their love of junk-shopped, jerry-rigged gear. “It kind of compresses in this way that sounds like the amp is going to explode. It's a classic sound,” he says about what drew him to it. And during the winter weekend that Beach and the band spent recording in a barebones country shack in Baynton, Victoria, it actually did blow up — although thankfully not until after they’d gotten "Societal Breakdown" down on tape.
The urgency of Beach’s music is also connected to the ways he uses feedback, which, despite its absence from his earliest solo material, has become an integral part of his sound. He traces his love for it back to Comets on Fire (“just three guitars going fucking bananas!”), who he was introduced to around the time he was just starting out, as well as to the work of Hunches guitar mangler Chris Gunn, and his undersung Melbourne pal, Chris Smith, who played on Dream Violence (“There’s nobody who can use feedback like him.”) The shrill sound of feedback is one of the first things you hear on the 2022 EP and something that often hovers in the near background of Beach’s songs, gathering strength until it’s given room to scream. And scream it does on songs like “I Never Had Enough Time With You,” from Gravity/Repulsion for instance, where, coming out of the first verse and into the chorus it sounds like a backup singer leaning sharply into a harmony line.
“Once the boat is in motion,” Beach explains about working with feedback, “you’re supposed to kind of steer it into making it work. There’s this uncontrollable aspect to it, where you’re really just waiting to see what’s going to happen.”
The sense that things might go sideways, or fall apart completely, is what makes Beach’s music such a thrilling listen, especially in a live setting. “I think it has to do with the raw, running-off-the-rails emotion he performs with,” says Zac Ives, co-owner of Goner Records, the legendary Memphis garage rock label who’ve released Beach’s last few records domestically. He thinks Beach is one of the rare quote-unquote songwriters whose music is best experienced live, with the looseness and spontaneity of a typical Michael Beach performance helping to create something really authentic. “It brings everyone together - like the entire crowd is rooting for him. It's a pretty amazing thing to witness and to be a part of.”
As urgent and immediate as Beach’s music is, both live and on record, his songwriting process tends towards the opposite: slow, and something with which he’s consistently struggled. “Seeing a musical idea [through] from start to finish is challenging for many reasons,” he told an interviewer back in 2013. “I don’t give much thought to what style the songs are, or how they will fit together until quite late in the process.” Things haven’t changed much since then, with his songs continuing to be written in a variety of styles and over long periods of time, making the final product of his releases seem kind of “scattershot,” according to Beach.
Of course, there are exceptions to how quickly a song comes together. “Only A Memory,” the piano ballad that closes the 2022 EP, where you can hear his love of cult songwriters like Bill Fay, spilled out of him all at once and fully formed. “Rarely does that happen,” admits Beach, who wrote the song in a moment of trauma after losing a friend. “It was just like blahhh and it was out. God, if I could do that every time…,” he muses.
The fact that “Only A Memory” was written so effortlessly stands in interesting contrast to its opening verse, which details the moment when he and his friends receive the bad news, affecting their ability to speak or even think straight: “We were all on the phone when the call came down, and we talked about it / But the words came backwards out, and the thoughts got lost, we laughed about it,” he sings, his voice poised yet warping around the shapes of the vowels and settling to a hush at the end of each line.
A sparsely-arranged song, “Only A Memory” was recorded as it was written, in one fell swoop. After demoing the song, and feeling like it could use some stand-up bass, Beach reached out on a whim through social media to one of his musical heroes, the long-running Australian experimental outfit The Necks, hoping to connect with bassist Lloyd Swanton. To his surprise, he heard back from Swanton just a few hours later telling him that he loved the track. The two proceeded to make plans to record it, with Swanton bringing his arco and pizzicato basses, along with a “slew of ideas” to the session. “We played together for three hours on the day that we met, and it was just magical,” says Beach of working with Swanton. “It was one of the most enjoyable recording experiences I’ve ever been a part of.”
He adds: “[Swanton] treated me as a peer and a professional which I’m happy to be treated as and I would hope people would treat me that way. But it’s certainly not expected from someone in a realm much higher than mine.”
Reflecting on his work prior to the 2022 EP, Beach admits that he used to second-guess himself a lot, especially in regard to whether his music sounded distant enough from its influences. This might be a funny thing for Beach’s fans to hear given the uncanny way his songs have of sounding like forgotten favorites upon first listen, familiar in a way that’s impossible to put a finger on — and in the rare cases where one is able to pinpoint an influence, the way he transcends it with such effortless-seeming grace.
This worry of originality is something that Gilsenan, his partner, as well as Warden and other close friends, have helped him to make peace with, recognizing the ways his unique stamp ends up on everything he produces. The final product of Beach’s songs, he’s come to realize, has as much to do with the writing and recording process, as it does with the musicians he chooses to play with, whose contributions color his songs. He points to “Have You Ever?,” the sparkling, slow-picked number on the 2022 EP’s second side, which has an undeniable Big Star vibe to it (picture a tremolo-ed out, less anthemic “Thirteen”), as the one on the record that skates closest to its influence. “But when Bonnie came in and did her thing to it,” he’s quick to recognize, referring to Mercer’s keening and rumbling guitar work that seeps into the mix about halfway through, “it immediately pulled it out of [being a Big Star knockoff] and into… something else.”
Beach is likewise optimistic about his struggles with writing pace. For the next album, he plans to take steps towards formalizing his process, which he hopes will help both how his songs function as a whole and act as a more sustainable way of working. He aims to dedicate a period of a few months to writing new material during which he won’t play any shows. “When you end up playing smaller, little one-off shows here and there,” he reflects on something he’s had a tendency of doing in the past, “it breaks up the process of writing, or breaks up the process of rehearsing, and so things take a while.” Once he has an album-sized chunk of new material written, he then plans to bring in the band to help flesh it out. Finally, they’ll test drive the songs on the road for a few weeks, helping things to really gel before heading into the recording studio.
Whether it all works out the way he envisions remains to be seen, of course. But what is certain, as far as Beach is concerned, is that the end result will be distinctly his own: “As long as I continue to create, there will always be this part of me — this thing — that there will always be traces of. I can try really hard to steer it, but ultimately my songs are going to come out sounding connected. There’s just no way not to have that happen.”