The most common criticism leveled at Bettie Serveert is that their songs all sound the same, and by extension that the Dutch group's albums are equally interchangeable, showing little deviation from the art-jangle formula established by the Betties' classic 1992 debut Palomine. Sure, that album was a college-radio smash, and along with Pavement, Liz Phair and Yo La Tengo, the band helped cement Matador's early-90s rep as the premiere purveyor of wiseassed, wide-eyed indie rock.
But it's pretty clear, with a career now spanning ten years and five studio albums, that Bettie Serveert have remained truer to their original mission statement than their colleagues, and their albums, released like clockwork every two years or so, have always reflected that self-imposed aesthetic dogma. The band does what they do, and nothing more-- they've never made us suffer through a concept album or a period piece, and we thank them for that.
Their last outing, 2000's Private Suit, attempted to recapture their Matador-era momentum by reuniting de Artsen drummer Reiner Veldman with his former bandmates, and hiring ace PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish to produce. Still, something was amiss: Private Suit's forays into orchestral pop-- the strings, the jazz-brush percussion, the melodies nicked from ABBA-- were far more convincing than the rockers, which lacked the garage-y punch and snarling feedback that made the band so charming in the first place. In the year of Modest Mouse, Sigur Rós and Kid A, Bettie Serveert never felt so quaint.
Well, it must be time to change the batteries in the smoke detector and clean the guns, because here come Bettie Serveert once more with Log 22-- an album that might be considered "transitional," if the band are dead-set on becoming a band that completely suck. With a bloated 60+ minute runtime and some truly misguided dabblings with e-bows and saxophones, Log 22 presents Bettie Serveert at their most self-indulgent. And it's not pretty.
The distraction of singer Carol van Dyk's myriad side projects is partially to blame-- Chitlin Fooks' Stoffel Verlackt drums, plays bass, and arranges horns on Log 22, and Fooks/Shadowgraphic City frontman Pascal Deweze has a vocal cameo. Jeroen Blankert (of improvisational jazz-punkers Munzruh) replaces the more versatile Veldman behind the drumkit; even longtime bassist Herman Bunskoeke is pushed aside for a good third of the album, leaving guitarist Peter Visser and van Dyk to go Dutch with most of the songwriting. The personnel changes and risky, overly ambitious material, in conjunction with Visser's decision to produce the album himself, result in an album that is most generously described as "random."
Log 22 is sporadically peppered with the five-to-eight minute epics that characterized the Lamprey period and the shorter, half-baked pop confections that padded Dust Bunnies. In the latter category, there's "Not Coming Down", an overdriven two-minute sketch that barely sticks around long enough to register a melody that features a vague slipstream of lyrical non-sequiturs. Or the overly aggressive "Smack", typical of the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink production-- a knotty clusterfuck of sampled whistling, stuttered percussion, noise, and three dueling layers of van Dyk's amped-up vocals.
But the album's most egregious sins are, not coincidentally, its most adventurous. Take the bleating, maudlin "Have a Heart", which contains the lyrics, "Can we synchronize our souls?" and, "Life can be so easy, like tonguing candy out your molars" (yuck?) and devolves in a brassy din of sax solos. The treacly "Captain of Maybe" pits the spacy wail of an e-bow against vaguely nautical flute-like synths and discordant sine waves undulating in and out of the mix as van Dyk sing-drones stream-of-consciousness dreck like, "I'm drawing a circle on this invisible map of our lives, placing thumbtacks on all the dreams we've ever had."
Even potentially good songs are pulled under by poor aesthetic choices: the meandering, overly arty verses of opener "Wide-Eyed Fools", for instance, seem grafted from a completely different song than the explosive, satisfying choruses. The band's simply not wound tight enough to pull it off. Likewise with the eight-minute-plus "White Dogs", which begins promisingly by segueing from a chamber-pop prologue into a chugging, Velvets-style groove, but van Dyk's vocals and the drumming feel overly mannered, especially in this halcyon age of Interpols and Strokes. Oh, by the way, that one ends with a sax solo, too.
If you still think all Bettie Serveert songs sound alike, or still cling to Palomine like a fraying security blanket, look no further than "De Diva", exactly the kind of wordy, pleasant-enough slow-burner that recalls those halcyon early 90s, sans-freshness. Likewise with "Cut 'n' Dried", a new recording of a Private Suit-era song with a thick syrup of strings, jazzy drums and drunken piano that sounds, well, just like an outtake from Private Suit.
On the other hand, Bettie Serveert make a few departures so radical they're barely recognizable at all: "Certainlie", a torchy duet with Chitlin Fooks' Deweze, hails from the same mediocre prom-song planet as that Sarah Shannon solo album. The jammy, vaguely U2-ish sketch "Given" sucks six minutes from your life with little more than a five-note melody and a go-nowhere drumbeat. But Log 22's most shocking left turn comes with album closer "The Love-In", a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Shania Twain and "Lovefool"-era Cardigans with Visser chugging away on a wah pedal like he's auditioning for Austin Powers' backup band. This is precisely the type of drivel that could end up on the bestselling soundtrack to some Adam Sandler vehicle and become Bettie Serveert's Big Hit Single, to be begrudgingly played in encores for decades of grueling reunion tours.
"Don't try to fix a thing that isn't broke," van Dyk sings in "De Diva", and it'd be nice if she'd follow her own advice. Though their relevance has clearly faded over the years, the once-dependable indie warhorses of Bettie Serveert have finally delivered an out-and-out turkey, simply by not being themselves. At their loosest and most rules-free (circa Lamprey, let's say), Bettie Serveert's energy can be infectious, liberating; here they just come off as underpracticed and unfocused. At best, Log 22 is acceptable-- at its worst, unlistenable. Anybody got a match?
