So it's come to this. After spending their debut kicking out lengthy Daft Punk-style house jams, Louisville's VHS or BETA have moved on, like so many bands this year, to pillaging the dance-friendly template of late-80s Cure-- Night on Fire, their second outing, finds them window-dressing themselves in shades of black and purple. While the band's past is well-researched, but it smacks of microfiched headlines and yellowed Newsweeks. Their very name is a calculated allusion to the Reagan era, in the way it whimsically cites trends that those alive at the time understand as useless fads or outmoded technology that we're grateful to be rid of. Sadly, their music is everything the name implies-- a fuzzy fourth-generation bootleg of a bygone decade's pop culture trash.
The title track opens with a summary of what's to come. Limp guitar lines bounce against a studio-stiffened dance beat that'll become painfully familiar by album's end (hint: there's only one.) Jerky, lock-kneed basslines bottom out beneath faux-Anglo vocals, and merge with production-added noise-squalls. As the song builds toward a unifying chorus that pleads, "Put your hands together/ And we'll light this night/ Light this night on fire," the image conveyed is more of trash-can weenie roasts than the inter-city conflagration the album attempts to incite. These faceless angst-jams constitute the album's entire runtime, from the flame-out angularity of "The Melting Moon" to the watery dance-punk of "No Cabaret".
When not tracking 80s legends through the velveteen eve, VHS or BETA find time to retrace their own electro-disco roots. "Nightwaves" adds jagged, kinetic guitar striking to their frothy beats, but it's the clean, Joe Satriani-inspired soloing that really stands out, wiping away the song's advancing tensions amidst cheesy guitar pyrotechnics. "Forever" is an inert, vocoded club track that adds eons to its namesake, bleating the title-phrase for almost six stale minutes atop a pungent mechanical beat. Like so much of the album, ideas are borrowed second-hand and regurgitated with a lifeless will to sustain the band, but never inspire others. Night on Fire may be enough to sustain their Astralwerks contract for one more album, but by then we'll likely be too preoccupied with more pressing dilemmas to notice.
