The Beatpack: The Violet Hour – Album Review

The Beatpack return with another album doused in the raw RnB garage sound they love, complementing 60s-style pop melodies, and a dash of psych to flavour.

We had to wait more than three decades for The Beatpack to follow up their debut album, but the band have turned things around a damn sight quicker for their third. Once again on their new home Spinout Nuggets, they have produced a wonderful album that highlights the different shades of RnB-infused garage pop that they love so much. It’s the kind of music that filled the caverns and clubs across the UK before Merseybeat and Carnaby Street went global.

They certainly do not disappoint on their third album, The Violet Hour, blending that classic Germanium fuzz sound into straight-forward riffs over pounding original RnB right from the off on their recent single Wednesday’s Calling. When the organ flies in mid-break, you can hear how all the ingredients are there to make this an album steeped in the garage sound of yore. It’s the drive beneath the songs, a primitive rhythm, that surges them forward, tying them together and enabling them to wind layers over the top.

On songs like Cafe Conversation #48, they delve into classic psych sounds, spiralling riffs in the breaks and backward guitars, while That’s A Lie strips everything down to a Teenage Shutdown grooving stomp. The title track has a definite Pretty Things vibe and is a late highlight, but it’s Early Morning Nightshade, opening the second side, that springs the real surprise with its more wistful and postoral acoustic psych, the sound of summer slowly ebbing away. At that point, it’s easy to think that the band had opted for an album of two halves, something they may want to consider considering the beauty of the song, but the storming early-Who-like People In The City soon dispels the notion. Peppering in more playful songs like Who’s That Knockin’, barnstorming garage rockers like Down On His Luck, and As I Come Closer, which skips, stutters and starts over a great wandering bassline, the band prove that second winds can still blow wild.

For a band that we can only assume saw life get in the way thirty years ago, it’s fantastic to see that, after all that time, they have a fire inside to produce records like this.

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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.