Album Review: Beth Blade & The Beautiful Disasters - Vintage Rebel & Trauma Bond

You can't have a shadow without a light, despite how it might feel sometimes. In order for there to be darkness you notice, there must be a place where we can see the light shining. We might be barred from getting there, and it might feel like a trick spawned by a demon, but it has to exist. To put it another way, as I did in a song I wrote; "Even a dying filament can reveal how dark it's been."

Beth Blade is leaning into the duality with her band's newest album, which is sequenced as two short episodes that swing on either side of the pendulum. "Vintage Rebel" uses its six songs as a throwback to the old days of rock and roll, the days before we really had an understanding of what is happening to our mental health. Those are the songs about being out with friends, having a few drinks, and enjoying the sound of a good band. It's a necessary part of life to find little moments of joy, and to balance out the moments that eat us alive, but in all honesty it doesn't make for as compelling a set of songs.

The "Vintage Rebel" songs try to be uplifting and fun, but that era of classic rock is one I never experienced in real time, and it's one I never went back and learned to love either. Songs that pull from the sound of classic Aerosmith and Kiss, often written about drinking and revelry, aren't going to have much appeal to me.

I'm much more interested in the "Trauma Bond" portion of the record, as much of the last year has felt like emotional trauma to me. Music is a healer, but more in the sense of giving me the emotional context to process my own thoughts than in getting me to lift a beer. Frankly, I've never had one, and I'm not going to start now.

The sound turns darker as the subject matter does, which is a more fitting palate for Beth's voice. She sounds more natural belting out songs about pain than she does about drinking, although the production of this record doesn't put her voice to the forefront the way I would like. A trauma bond is a human connection, and that is harder to do musically without the vocal up front and center for us to latch onto.

"When will I see myself as more than broken," she sings, working through the emotional damage of a controlling relationship. This is when Beth is at her best, showing us her truth as an act of bravery. She isn't covering her past in metaphors the way I would, but rather using honesty as a superpower to beat back the demons that never seem to fully die off. Being able to get through those episodes, and turn them into compelling rock music, is what connects us and gives us the collective strength to keep going on.

Beth deals with issues of self-image in "Dysmorphia", which bookends with "You Never Screamed" to show how common abuse is in this life. If we aren't suffering at the hands of others, we wind up doing it to ourselves. The idea of happiness is one of those things we might have created because it was necessary to believe in, even if there was no evidence it was real. We have come up with far more ways to torture ourselves and others than we ever did ways to make life easier and better. Life can feel like a zero-sum game, one played by zeroes, which amounts to a whole lot of nothing.

Beth wonders if she has perhaps found the light at the end of the tunnel by the end of the record, but it comes in the form of an eclipse, which is a spotlight cast behind a curtain. We might think there is something better waiting for us, but we don't know until we lift the veil. That is always the danger lurking in the back of our minds.

All of this leaves the record with an odd feeling. I don't know if the conceit doesn't work, or if it just doesn't work for me because half of it is out of my character. What I can say is that the "Trauma Bond" half is compelling, and thought-provoking, and stands up with the music Beth and her band have made in the past.

This is her therapy, and that it helps her find her way is all that really matters.