beabadoobee: This Is How Tomorrow Moves
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Beatrice Laus, known informally as Beabadoobee, releases her third album, her first since the significant honour of supporting Taylor Swift on the Eras tour, and soon to head out on her own locally and internationally. Did she suffer any effects from the mass exposure to so many Swifties? MK Bennett listens in.
This Is How Tomorrow Moves is an album out of time, partly because its forward-looking title is also about how yesterday moved too, a work that needs the past to show a different path. Bea was born in the Philippines and raised in London, and similarly to any of our mixed heritage artists has an advantage over the standardised and vanilla by an unconscious knowledge of self. Not that this would definitively show itself in the music anyway but any remove is potential difference, and it is the new that pushes Pop music forward, its evolution always sitting on the possibility of the unused, the unthought of. She does not sing in Tagalog, not here anyway, nor does she need to, she only has to be here now and exist.
Song number one, Take A Bite moves slowly and carefully, a mix of every cool Indie-Pop adjacent singer-songwriter of the 90s with a little All Saints thrown in, and where self-belief becomes more useful than clear thinking. At the same time, a bunch of nearly invisible hooks catch you by surprise. California is a warm synthesis of By The Way era Chillies and The Cardigans, a surface smooth beauty in the high melody, while the lyrics talk of change versus not changing and being on the wrong side of the conversation.
One Time is an excellent thing, an early Radiohead album compacted down into one song, the guitars ringing like bells in an old Parisian church, echoes of Nirvana in the arrangement and instrumentation. Real Man has a singsong melody, almost Music – Box like, tranquil like the day scenes in a horror film, with the surety of what’s to come. The denouement of Bowles Cabaret if it had been made by Disney. Excellent and strange.
Tie My Shoes is a tale of family told through the lens of a daughter, a deeply moving device that frames the song in a melancholy relatable to millions, of parents who cannot see their children. There’s a feeling that Rick Rubin, who has produced the album with his customary dryness, which mostly works, is trying to contain the sound, instead of uncontaining it, that the overflowing orchestra that appears so suddenly, disappears just as quickly, with little reoccurrence. Tie My Shoes though, is unbreakable.
Girl Song, piano-led and Carpentersesque in its straightforward monologue to camera, seems partly about the trials of the feminine and partly a lesson to be easier on yourself when you are presented with age, that most unwelcome inevitability. Coming Home, is a sweet apology to someone, from the mind of any touring musician, away from family and sleeping in another hotel bed, a slight and slightly Chanson song that sits well in its own company.
Beabadoobee has been travelling around supporting Taylor Swift, a gig that God herself would not turn down, and clearly works with brilliant people constantly, from the bright and pointed videos to the pastel album cover and clever marketing. The video for her first ever single clocked in at just under two billion views and counting. Still, now on her third album, you get the feeling that she is presenting an idea of her own control, musically at least, ready to be front and centre in all important ways.
Ever Seen, when you change your life because of one comment, one look you couldn’t forget is more Morrisette, Alanis, a slow opening before the big rock chorus, tempered by the Modern Pop sensibilities of Charli XCX or Dua Lipa, as well as a distinct Coldplay undercurrent. A Cruel Affair is a teenage mini-opera based around The Boys Of Summer riff, and all the better for it, the relaxed and languid Girl From Ipanema vibes in contrast to the Gen Z anxieties of the lyrics.
Post has a gorgeous Rubin drum intro before business resumes on the remainder of the song, another 90s influenced rocker with an excellent Bassline and close to a Shoegaze chorus. Beaches has no immediate nod to Bette Midler, it seems to be about allowing yourself the grace to let go for a while, a lovely Indie-Rock song and yet another pitch perfect vocal.
The vocal performance throughout is classy without being showy or mellifluous, absolutely confident in doing the best thing in service of the song. Everything I Want is a perfect case in point, a deceptively simple and subtle song, from a whisper to a murmur with a confident lack of hesitation, nearly breaking but retaining the control. The Man Who Left Too Soon, another upbeat European number with little backing, a Frankly Mr. Shankly for the TikTok generation.
Lastly, This Is How It Went is a Folky and folksy acoustic lament for lost things, an elegiac soundtrack for the end of something that hurt but you’d still repeat. Throughout, Rubin does his best to stay out of the way and unnoticed, letting the songs steer the ship. The mix of Karen O and First Aid Kit and Chart Pop shouldn’t work but it does, to a spectacular degree and maybe the feeling she had as a child, that intangible other, like a cloaked ghost, while she soaked up her parents Pinoy music as well as all that 90s finery, maybe that’s the glue that holds her remarkable music together.
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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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