The Beths’ guitar hooks and backing vocals would be enough for a potent debut.
The Beths develop a complicated world without a clear sense of what to do, so moments like the chorus of “Not Running” provide just the right amount of grounding. In the midst of those feelings, they deliver “Not Running” and its embrace of emotional risk, even in wariness. The group’s ability to pound ahead relentlessly, almost gleefully, in the face of doubt keeps the record from being either too bubbly or too troubled. Stokes wanders into and struggles out of relationships but never loses her nerve. Debut full-length Future Me Hates Me builds on the New Zealand group’s poppy version of ’90s alt-rock, mixing in some girl-group-style harmonies with a thoroughly contemporary sensibility.
The Beths, led by Elizabeth Stokes, assert uncertainty better than anyone else around right now. What initially began as an anonymous side project, an outlet for material that was to obscure for Renaissance Man, has developed into a distinct conceptual identity, simulating a bleak but necessary reflection of our digital opiate culture. Amnesia Scanner toys with learned memetic, consumer behaviors, implanting hedonistic music with thoughtful criticisms. Pop tropes are shrieked by their frequent collaborator Pan Daijing, or ciphered by the Oracle-a computerized voice that croons like a disillusioned Crazy Frog. Treating pop structures as memes, musical and lyrical anaphoras mechanically compute until their deceptive screens are cracked. Now, their 2018 debut album Another Life makes sense and builds upon their initially cryptic thesis: simultaneously emulating and questioning how we satiate IRL anxieties with URL opiates, or what they call “narratives of… salvation via technology”. Every track title was prefaced by “AS”, and each music video regurgitated images from internet’s forgotten corners, but for what reason? As they used to refuse interviews and released several unannounced, unexplained EP’s and mixtapes, Amnesia Scanner floated around as illegible codes for devoted listeners to decipher. Created in late 2013, the group is not exactly new, but they have remained somewhat unrecognizable and wholly inaccessible until this year. Amnesia Scanner is the experimental electronic duo of Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala.
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