One of my gripes with a good percentage of new music nowadays is that originality has seemingly taken a backseat to the pursuit of aesthetic image. Most of today’s artists are decidedly bent on emulating their heroes, existing as an homage to the past without adding any modifications to the original. You can’t blame them. It’s a lot easier to look backwards in time for inspiration than it is to draw from music’s unwritten future.

But there are exceptions; every once in a blue moon, we get blessed with bands like Beak.

Beak are a true 21st century original. They’ve successfully managed to alchemize krautrock and electronic music - two genres that typically would go together like tofu and reddi-whip (unless you’re a Kraftwerk fan, of course) - in a way that’s fresh and exciting. While certainly not derivative, their influences tend to reveal themselves at times. Hints of tribal music, Can, Neu, Harmonia, Eno, and even Sabbath at their heaviest moments, are evident.

““What bores the fuck out of me is when I know where a chord is going to go next. And if it goes there, it leaves me cold on an emotional level.””

— Geoff Barrow

Looking back at each member of Beak’s past work, it’s no surprise the group possesses some sort of predisposition towards innovation. As chief soundsmith of Portishead (!), producer and drummer Geoff Barrow invented and subsequently perfected the modern day trip-hop formula of layering orchestral soundscapes over trashy bits of recycled hip hop ephemera. Bassist Billy Fuller helped revive Robert Plant’s (!!) solo career by lending his voice in reinterpreting an entire catalog of Zeppelin classics for modern audiences. And half a decade later, we still can’t really wrap our heads around keyboardist Will Young’s solo debut Earth Loop.

The Beak catalog currently consists of four LPs ( >, >>, >>>, and Kosmik Musik) and a handful of singles that eventually became the L.A. Playback compilation. There aren’t many dull moments in their discography; each release merits its own deep dive. Also worth checking out is political journalist Anika Henderson’s goth-dub LP Anika, which was jointly produced by Barrow and Fuller in 2010 and has since become a modern classic worthy of its own praise.

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The importance of bands like Beak cannot be stressed enough. They exist as a blueprint amongst a world of carbon copies, a much needed dose of originality in an age in which most artists default to mimicry. One listen and you’ll see what we mean. —Jackson Todd

P.S. They’ve got your holiday playlist covered, too.

[above photo by Rebecca Cleal]