El Ángel Exterminador

The Beige

     

Don’t let this second album from The Beige pass you by. “The Exterminating Angel” alone is a flat-out gem of sweeping melancholia, the kind of thing that gives soft rock a good reputation (it’s possible!). The album title comes from a Luis Buñuel movie, and in the playfully dark manner of the great Spanish surrealist, “The Exterminating Angel” is like a love song to some monstrous near-future plague, as if Calexico and Harry Nilsson had teamed up to eulogize the next history-ending species die-off.

This apocalyptic mood runs through the entire record, in contrast to the obvious joy that vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Rick Maddocks and his five stellar bandmates have audibly taken in the making of it. Among those players is drunk-on-tremolo guitarist Jon Wood and keyboardist Andrew Arida, whose accordion embellishment makes the lyrically terrifying “I Got a Job in the Belly of the Beast” sound like French soundtrack music from the ’60s.

Maddocks’s thoughtful words become powerful and scary inside this jazz-noir soundscape, whether he’s gazing in horror at the quasi-human postcollapse refugees of “Road”, who “were eating something strange, with a face”, or honing in on more immediate global catastrophes in the funky “King George”.

This is smart and angry songwriting, given a perverse sheen of beauty. There couldn’t be a classier soundtrack for hoarding water, tinned food, and ammo.