Ramblings From Green To Green

If the first wave of neo-garage drew inspiration from music and records released fifteen/twenty years before and was already categorized as nostalgic, who knows how the choice of many protagonists to pick up their instruments thirty years later will be interpreted. The latest in line are the English band Beatpack, creators of a beautiful album and a striking sequence of singles where they fanatically reinterpret nederbeat, maximum European R 'n B, and garage punk. The new album, arriving ten years after a reunion that yielded a quartet of singles, is released in three hundred copies via Spinout Nuggets, so few that not even Discogs has updated in real time, and it goes back to blowing on those dusts even if the approach is now less feverish and more studied, with a total of eight musicians involved and the addition of exogenous instruments to that mixture, showing a partial widening of perspective towards freakbeat and the elaborate baroque style of late beat. In this direction definitely go tracks like Five O’Clock Sunday Morning, Endless Halls of Her Reflections, Footsteps, Echo, Poor Old Billy Wren. However, the main path, that traced by bands like Outsiders and the early Yardbirds and Pretty Things, is by no means abandoned; on the contrary, it is traversed thoroughly on tracks like Or So It Seems, All Good Things, Black Sea Tobacco Pose, Winter’s Child, Money in My Pocket, Rambling from Green to Green, finding also new side escape routes and labyrinthine intersections that make the setlist vibrant and full of surprises.

The puritans can keep their evaluations on nostalgia and go back to sleeping on indie-rock records. For now, just let us enjoy this half-hour in the company of the Beatpack.