Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Crickets / Music 12 O'Clock Track: Beauty Pill, "Afrikaner Barista"
Posted by Leor Galil on 02.08.12 at 12:00 PM
For most folks, Dischord will always be synonymous with the style of punk known as the "D.C. sound." In the 80s that meant hardcore, in the 90s it meant postpunk, and in the aughts things started getting weird—a lot of material Dischord put out challenged every notion of a local sound. Take Beauty Pill, an excellent experimental postrock act fronted by Chad Clark (formerly of Smart Went Crazy) that fuses punk, jazz, hip-hop, funk, and anything else that pops into an irresistible whole.
It's been eight years since Beauty Pill released their only full-length, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, and this year the group will drop two follow-up albums that were recorded partly in public last summer. Today's 12 O'Clock Track is "Afrikaner Barista," the first song Clark has posted from those public recording sessions, and it's easily the best tune to feature a dog bowl that you'll hear all year. Listen to it, then read up on Beauty Pill's public-recording experiment and their similarly executed public-listening display at the Reader's sister publication in D.C. (Full disclosure: the author of those pieces, Washington City Paper arts editor Jonathan L. Fischer, is a friend.)
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