A new Beachwood Sparks album in 2012 makes as perfect and as little sense as one did 12 years ago. Emerging on Sub Pop in 2000-- just before the label's Shins-assisted second wind-- the L.A. country-rockers may have been an anomaly on their own label, but they were waving the flag for a new cosmic Americana alongside the more revered likes of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Grandaddy, and Sparklehorse. The Sparks, however, were the most earthbound of the bunch, favoring egalitarian group vocals over a dominating presence and an easy-going West Coast groove over grandiose gestures (though their roots-rock purism was flexible enough to accommodate at least one great Sade cover). By 2003, they'd quietly splintered into myriad offshoot acts (the Tyde, Mystic Chords of Memory, and the sadly overlooked All Night Radio). While Sub Pop has since figured out how to sell long-haired harmony groups to the masses, the Sparks still feel better suited to intimate campfire congregations than soft-seater-theaters. The band's first new album in 10 years feels every bit out of time and place as their debut did back in 2000. It's like some accidentally discovered, immaculately preserved turn-of-the-1970s obscurity stumbled upon in your local record store's dustiest dollar bin.
Beachwood Sparks initially reunited in 2008 for Sub Pop's 20th-anniversary celebrations, so they have had a few years to figure out how to be a band again. But damn if they don't make it sound so easy on The Tarnished Gold, which presents Beachwood Sparks exactly how we remembered them: loose, playful, and coolly unpretentious, but capable of making you weak-kneed in an instant with a simple melancholic melody, turn of phrase, and weepy guitar lead. The only indication that this band had been mothballed for the better part of a decade comes through the knowing lyrics: The gorgeously understated opener "Forget the Song" begins with a line-- "It's time to stop pretending/ Those days are gone"-- that essentially serves as a challenge to the band to honor its legacy; the freewheeling dust-up "Sparks Fly Again" responds in kind by giving the reformed band its own celebratory theme song. The bleary title track, meanwhile, sees Gunst coming to terms with the Sparks' split ("Funny how when you find what you're looking for/ It was already there"). And on "Earl Jean", he effectively sums up the the band's current condition when he proudly sings: "Back in town/ Out of style." (Even a covert guest appearance from Ariel Pink bears no modernizing influence.)
Beachwood Sparks' final pre-breakup release, 2003's Make the Cowboy Robots Cry EP, was the band's shortest non-single release but also its most meandering, as it awkwardly tried to stretch their humble sound into something unnecessarily epic. The Tarnished Gold effectively glosses over that aberration to reassert the group's real strength: soft-focussed, sunset balladry, best exemplified here by the Dead-reckoning "Water From the Well", and the slow-dissolve serenity of "Leave That Light On", whose aquatic ambience posits it as a distant cousin to Hendrix's "May This Be Love?". (Thankfully, deviations from this gameplan, like the silly mariachi-band exercise "No Queremos Oro" and the cheeky bluegrass gospel of "The Orange Grass Special", are limited to brief two-minute spurts.) It's unclear at this point if The Tarnished Gold represents the beginning of a new chapter for Beachwood Sparks, or whether it's the proper last hurrah the band couldn't muster in their first go-round. (The album's closing hymn "Goodbye" along with bassist Brent Rademaker's closing quote in this bio supports the latter theory.) But, at this moment, The Tarnished Gold is an impressively vital showing from a group that deserves to be known as something more than that other Beach band on Sub Pop.
