Over the course of their 1997-2004 run, The Beta Band were a model of aggressive, unabashed peculiarity: from their psych-folk/hip-hop hybrids and sound-collage pranksterim to video shoots in inhospitable climes and bizarro stage outfits involving electric-lit space suits and/or sombreros. Melodic linearity and lyrical candour were never at the top of their to-do list, so it was a pleasant surprise that former frontman Steve Mason’s 2010 solo debut, Boys Outside, evinced such a warm, welcoming folk-rock accessibility and emotional directness. After struggling through the Beta Bands’ flagging commercial fortunes and his own public battles with depression, the album essentially functioned as a form of therapy: You got the sense that Mason was not only picking up the pieces of his once-ascendant career, but of his life.
It’s a process he’s still grappling with on Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time, which opens with Mason in a familiar setting: lying in bed, engaged in the sort of nocturnal self-analysis that results from spending too many restless hours staring at the ceiling. The first words we hear him sing on the fever-dreamy “Lie Awake” are “At 15 years old, I had to know/ What makes you fail, and what makes you grow”, suggesting that even these astute adolescent inklings couldn’t fully prepare him for the rollercoaster course his adult life would take. But if Monkey Minds begins as another intensely introspective exercise, it gradually blossoms into something else entirely: over 20 sprawling but strategically stitched tracks, its temperament veers from solipsistic to altruistic, charting Mason’s transformation from a man too insecure to leave his room, to one who can no longer ignore the injustices transpiring outside his window.
And that progression is as much musical as it is attitudinal. The first half of the album sees Mason revisiting and improving upon the Boys Outside template, bolstering his gently strummed serenades with more pronounced classic-rock flourishes. The chorus-summoning piano refrain of the beautifully aching “A Lot of Love” offers a distant echo of the Band’s “The Weight,” while the cheekily churchly “Lonely” and “Oh My Lord” sway in the direction of gospel-gilded FM-radio standards like Stephen Stills’ “Love the One You’re With” and the Stones’ “Loving Cup”. But while these songs count as the most winning and instantly anthemic that Mason has produced since the days when his old band was written into the High Fidelty screenplay, they’re buttressed by various cryptic interludes-- narrative spoken-word snippets (“The Old Problem”), squeaky melodica solos clashing with motorcylce-engine revs (“Flyover ‘98”), dubby instrumentals overlaid with Portuguese car-race commentary (“The Last of Heroes”)-- that reconnect him with the Beta Band’s exploratory ethos and deep sense of earthy groove.
And as you venture deeper into Monkey Minds, these transitory tracks start to feel less like nonsensical fragments and more as preludes that signal Mason’s restoked sense of swagger and social conscience. In a nod to early Beta Band experiments like “The House Song”, Mason cedes the mic to MC Mystro on “More Money, More Fire”, a synth-shocked rap-rant about the root causes of the incendiary 2011 London riots and police mistreatment of the underclass; the same shuffling beat is immediately repurposed on the subsequent “Fire!”, which channels the preceding song’s righteous indignation into a playful protest chant, buoyed by titanic blasts of brass imported from Primal Scream’s “Loaded.” And the string-spiked “Fight Them Back” is an even more disarming mix of funk and fury, with Mason casually commandeering a palace coup with “a fist, a boot, and a baseball bat,” topped by a sample of an especially smug Tony Blair quote that’ll inspire the rabble to start getting in their practice swings.
Monkey Minds’ sharp, late-act turn into politicized proselytizing may seem jarring at first, but then it’s an accurate reflection of how politics can suddenly intrude upon our lives and upend our worldview. It often takes something as calamitous as mass, citywide arson to remind the average person that there’s a world of hurt beyond their self-involved concerns. The gorgeous closing lullaby, “Come to Me”, finds Mason right back where he started-- lying in bed-- but it’s not his anxieties that are keeping him awake: “I used to sit alone and watch your cities rise,” he sings, “It flashed across my mind the murder in your eye.” He could be addressing his prime minister, or God itself, but in any event, it’s good to know Mason is now losing sleep for the right reasons.
