Before they joined forces in the mid 1990s, the members of Beachwood Sparks 1.0 were in a lot of bands that didn’t sound anything like Beachwood Sparks. Bassist Brent Rademaker was in Further, who sounded so much like Sonic Youth that Lee Ranaldo guested on their debut. Josh Schwartz and Tom Sanford were in an act called Winter Kills that cribbed its slack from Pavement, while Chris Gunst did time in the horribly named hardcore band Strictly Ballroom (which also featured Jimmy Tamborello). Playing in Beachwood Sparks was a means of “shaking loose the indie rock shackles,” writes Rademaker in the liners to Desert Skies, which the band recorded in 1997 as its debut but is only now getting around to releasing. Theirs was a very calculated and deliberate move to West Coast country pop; trading Dinosaur Jr for the International Submarine Band and Stephen Malkmus for Gene Clark was an emancipation of sorts from the strictures of indie-rock distortion and obscurity. Their music featured pedal steel and peaceful easy choruses, not to mention vintage western shirts, rodeo denim, and well-worn Wallabees.
These five dudes—along with percussionist Pete “Sleigher” Kinne—embraced both the music and the lifestyle with the fervency of acolytes. They were not only defining themselves, but also defining in even more emphatic terms what they were not. Beachwood Sparks was not another indie rock band. They had something like a mission, and it went well beyond, as Rademaker writes, “to get high and play music; and to get high and listen to music.” They were reviving Los Angeles as a rock-and-roll town, shifting the focus from post-STP trend jumpers to a scene rooted in the region’s pop history. Whatever subversive quality that goal might have possessed in 1997 is lost in 2013—not only because L.A. has a pretty bustling indie scene but also because the Beachwoods has seemingly sparked so many other acts, some great, others not so much. Cosmic American music has never sounded quite so earthbound as it does this far into the twenty-first century.
At the tail end of the twentieth, however, the members of Beachwood Sparks were only just learning the language of West Coast country pop. Steeping themselves in Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield, and Bradley’s Barn-era Beau Brummels, they had not yet figured out how to put their own stamp on the music, or even what they’re stamp would sound like. Instead, at this stage they were primarily mimics, more intent on re-creating a particular sound than on putting it toward sturdy songs. On “Make It Together", the theremin sounds like it has quote marks and a footnote attribution to “Good Vibrations.” Dutifully, the guitars chime and riff like the Byrds; the voices harmonize like CSN&Y. Only on the four relatively lo-fi bonus tracks does the music retain any real urgency or revel in its rough edges.
On the other hand, should we expect anything more than that from any band at this stage in its development? There is something commendable about the rambunctious energy they bring to the title track and the reasonably spacey “Canyon Ride”, even if it’s routinely undermined by the retreating vocals and their crate-digger reverence. Despite their L.A. origins, Beachwood Sparks isn’t a troupe of actors staging a period piece. They’re trying to revive this style of music, to prove it can say as much in 1997 as it did in 1970. Opinions vary as to whether or not the band ever managed to make this sunbaked sound their own. Sixteen years after these initial sessions—ten of which they spent on hiatus—they remain a surprisingly divisive band, with detractors accusing them of imitating rather than innovating. Desert Skies does absolutely nothing to answer that criticism, but it does provide a useful point against which to measure their later efforts. Compare this release to last year’s The Tarnished Gold, which was heavy with comedown melancholy, and it’s not hard at all to see how far they’ve come.
