EP Review: The Bloody Beetroots - "Forever Part One"

Who knew?  Who knew an Italian guy in a Grendel mask (the comic character, not the villainous monster from Beowulf,) could take a bunch of rock and punk songs and make them into loud, overdriven dance fodder in such an entertaining way.

Look, for ease of argument, let’s lump rock, metal, punk, alternative and everything in between into a catch-all term that we’ll call ‘the aggressive music community.’  It seems high time, not only with the success of this EP from Bloody Beetroots, but with the prominence over recent years from acts like Dampf, Zardonic and the resurrected Nine Inch Nails, that the aggressive music community come to recognize that electronic music will have a hand in the genre going forward.  Best to embrace it now.  

What stands out the most about all of these compositions is the way in which Rifo (the man behind The Bloody Beetroots,) uses his unique touch to accent and enhance the songs.  It’s not a delicate touch - Rifo’s hand overwhelms each track when his particular flavor of sound hits - but that’s what makes the EP work.  Where Rifo shows restraint is in the measures where he takes his hand away completely.

There’s going to be a lot of backhanded commentary coming, apologies in advance.  Focusing for a moment on the single “NUMB” that features Tokky Horror, the first forty-five seconds is a perfectly average alternative rock song.  And then it explodes.  The juxtaposition of noise level (and bass level) is the kind of switch-throwing that makes Forever Part One work so well.  Two worlds are colliding in a way that’s both refreshing and unique.  Add in the fact that Rifo stays his hand and only brings his electronic wall full bore during the choruses (and the thunderous outro,) and he, in conjunction with the band, has made something special.

This theme extends for the duration of the experience.  There’s nothing that would truly draw a listener into the basic premise of “I’m Not Holy” until the song breaks out into a dance hall thumper (one is reminded ever so slightly of the opening of season 2 of The Venture Bros, which featured the Aquagen song “Everybody’s Free.”)  The same applies towards the end of the EP with the song “Free,” which builds and builds until it eventually sounds like the best moments of a Streets of Rage soundtrack.  This is the kind of thing electronic music has been mastering over the last, oh, say four decades or so; the ability to slow build until the tension becomes burgeoning to the point that catharsis is all that’s left.  To hear that applied to aggressive music is a touch that’s been…’missing’ is the wrong word, but underutilized, for sure.

Spend some time with this.  Soak it in.  There’s a lot to like, both in the pleasure-of-listening sense (the bass alone will make you feel something,) and in the academic sense (the ongoing fusion of aggressive music and electronic dance music, which is a separate breed entirely from industrial.)  If we endeavor as music fans to grow and find new avenues for our fandom, then the Bloody Beetroots is offering something novel and different for us to imbibe.

Is It Artificial Intelligence, Or Artificial Humanity?

"Don't worry about the future, sooner or later it's the past."

Sometimes, that process happens faster than we expect it to. Right now, we are seeing AI seep into nearly every aspect of life, re-writing the rules of how the world operates. Music has not been immune to this, and what we are dealing with is a full-fledged existential crisis, as we have to wrap our heads around big questions about what exactly this art that means so much to us truly is.

News came recently that an artist who composes through AI signed a million-dollar deal with a label. Bands that are entirely fictitious are amassing streams on Spotify that are generating real money for the people who are running the algorithms. We now have songs that are protected by copyright, despite not being written by anyone human. This all might sound theoretical, except for the fact that AI has very quickly gotten to the point where it is not inherently inferior to human produced work. The kinks are getting smoothed out, and with that comes more reasons to knot our thinking.

"It's all about the music."

That is the refrain many of us have long defaulted to. Often, it gets used in the context of putting down music we find less 'real' and less 'authentic' than what we listen to. Rock fans will deride pop music for being synthetic and manufactured, as if we don't have countless rock bands that have been put together simply because there were a few 'names' involved, or that rock bands have been bringing in professional songwriters to help them find the mainstream for decades. Authenticity is less a fact, and more a rationalization we use to fool ourselves.

If it really is all about the music, AI shouldn't matter, should it? A great song is a great song regardless of how it was created. At least that's what our attitude tells us.

And yet, that is not the reality we find ourselves in. Shaking the emotional reaction we have to AI music is a difficult task, if it's one we even want to undertake. Our emotions dominate the way we think, even in the philosophical pursuits. Ethics are as much about what feels right as what we can argue objectively is right. Art is pure emotion. It's the digression from perfect representations of reality that make art what it is, that give it power, and that separate a painting from a photograph.

In an edition of "Singles Roundup", I talked about the 'band' Secret Frequency. Their song "Crashing Words" caught my attention when the YouTube algorithm pushed it to me. They have no online presence outside of AI generated music videos and the songs appearing on Spotify. They give every indication of being artificial, but I can't say if it is just the performances being generated, or if the compositions themselves are written by computer code. In either case, I feel safe in saying they are not a real band.

And yet, that song is one of my favorite songs of the year. It does everything a good song should, and the artifacts of sound in early AI generations is nearly no longer present. If you heard the song on the radio, you would never bat an eye at it. Saying that is a scary thing.

The 'band' has been releasing a song every week, and now has generated enough to fill out an album. While there are ebbs and flows to the quality, I can't sit here and tell you there's anything inferior about this to much of the music I have listened to this year from our traditional sources. Every week, as I sift through the albums being released looking for something that will spark my interest, I hear huge amounts of music that is worse than Secret Frequency.

On the one hand, I should be happy to welcome AI music if it is going to increase the amount of music out there on the scene I might find myself enjoying. On the other hand, the (former) artist in me is deeply offended at humanity being replaced by something that doesn't understand the very core of what art is.

And here's where we get to the uncomfortable part; the music we listen to has never been as pure as we like to think.

While of course there are artists out there who painstakingly craft works that put their souls on display for the world, there is also a massive amount of music that is made to sell music. Whether it was the glam metal that thought sex was the only subject that existed in the 80s, the boy-bands of the early 00s, or the trend of meaningless interpolations of today, so many of the songs we know and love weren't written with deep thoughts and powerful emotions behind them. They were written to flesh out an album, to fulfill a contract, and so on and so forth.

To put it in these terms; when so many rock songs are written about how rocking rock is, can we really say there is humanity, let alone art, in them?

AI's biggest problem is in justifying its existence in the artistic sphere. AI cannot write music that comes with a human story, so it will never be able to reach the true heights of artistry. The top shelf is out of the question, but it can be the proverbial 'volume scorer', right? Not really, because when AI makes generic and meaningless music, we already have humanity doing that. AI is supposed to be smarter than us, so making schlock isn't impressive. LA Guns is still out there, so we have plenty of garbage music made the old-fashioned way.

As I'm listening to these Secret Frequency songs, I'm worried less about AI rising up and taking over music, and worried more about how little we have expected from the humans making our music. Perhaps it is because we lowered the standards, because we didn't demand more, that we left the door open for this to happen. I was concerned years ago when a certain label whose albums we sometimes cover here had an in-house writer compose upwards of ten albums in a single year. It was already clear music was not actually saying anything, was not being treated as important. If that's the case, why shouldn't we farm out the busy-work?

The answer is because it offends our senses. Despite our own limitations, mediocre human art is still better than the best AI art, because art reflects who we are. AI music might sound just like the real thing, but it reflects the emptiness inside us.

I may be emotionally empty, but even though I like some of these songs, I'm not ready to say they speak to me.