Beat Connection: Band Name Checks Out
This Seattle electronic quartet is all about sincerity.
“I know you're waiting on my move tonight/hesitation/wait until the moment's right,” said no lothario ever. If Larry David collaborated with Chromeo, the result might be something like Beat Connection’s new album Product 3.
“Am I gonna be successful in the way I wanna be? Is this person gonna love me the way I want them to? Am I going to be available for a significant other? All those ideas are flashing in and out across these pop songs,” says producer Reed Juenger. The band (including drummer Jared Katz, bassist Mark Hunter, and vocalist Tom Eddy), which plays Gasa Gasa tonight at 7 p.m., just wants to be understood.
When Beat Connection sat down to write Product 3, they gradually decided every track would be about love. “For us, it’s the closest thing to a universal feeling,” Juenger says. “A lot of times we’d be thinking about things like, Had a shitty day at work or, My friend is doing this thing to me that’s really annoying m, Why won’t they let me help them? or something like that. Those kind of topics, we attempted to make universal by turning them into love songs.”
The straightforward lyrics make the songs even more relatable. With the exception of the opener “Hesitation,” the lyrics are all frequently repeated simple phrases about unrequited love and unsatisfying relationships. But their approach isn’t a calculated attempt to gain more fans; the band is simply passionate about providing genuine catharsis for those dealing with the human condition. The sparseness of the lyrics punctures your emotions as efficiently as an arrow, and allows Beat Connection to twist the blade with unexpected instrumentals.
“Thought Through,” for example, opens with a hopeful, cloud-parting groove while Eddy declares, “I look back on my life / and the time that I wasted.” It sounds like a death bed lament set to synthesizer. On “So Good,” the foot-tapping beat ends up feeling depressing when the conclusion reveals that the narrator has yet to reveal all the feelings he just proclaimed to the woman of his dreams, and is actually talking to himself. It’s this uneven emotional landscape that gives Beat Connection its “pretty widespread” audience.
“We were just trying to be really honest about our emotions and our dissatisfactions with some of the stuff going on around us,” says Juenger, “in Seattle and elsewhere. The one thing that we talk about and think about a lot when we’re working on music is the commodification of pop music.” He later adds, “we’re aware of that, and just constantly bombarded by advertisements for these things, and music is just another tool to sell these products, but we still love the music and want to be doing this, so how do you rectifiy that is one of the things that we’re trying to talk about and one of the ideas that we’re always falling back on—how do we go all the way in and then fuck it up from the inside out.”
