4 out of 5

Label: Veal Records

Produced by: Jamie Saft (recorded by), Randall Dunn (mixed by)

I, also, know this shtick: some jazz eldsters get it in their heads that they like rock and metal, and so they collab on a “heavy” album, and… you get The Bad Plus covering Nirvana. Now don’t get me wrong: BP can rock, and their covers are legit, but this was still very much cross-genre stuff – it was far from rock and made, purposefully or not, for a (then) NPR crowd to chatter about.

Drummer Bobby Previte has been all around the genre world, but jazz and jazz-adjacent is his mainstay; similarly, guitarist Jamie Saft has done time playing with and without heavy distortion, but I’d still heavily associate him with jazz. The third member of Beta Popes, Skerik, is a bit more of a wildcard with his ‘saxophonics’ electronics + sax, but still, sax is a jazz thing, right? So tagging this trio as doom metal, giving them an edgy name and album name with anarchic artwork is all a bit of a put on, innit, and we’ll be getting EZ-going Metallica covers or something.

Sorry, y’all, but if you’re coming in to this even with the open mind of being a Previte listener – whose works can drastically differ from album to album, project to project – you should prepare to poop your pants: I was not expecting to name drop Khante and Old Man Gloom in this review, but here we are.

Beta Popes are an improvisational doom metal act. The improv is what links the trio to their jazz associations; even accounting for improv in acts like SUMAC – which has some absolute antecedents here – the way Previte, Saft, and Skerik will let things ride while they find their way back to a theme is very jazz, and ultimately ties the tracks / album together in a wholly satisfying way. (…Even if those same improv tendencies allow for some bloat.) Otherwise some of the references made are pretty good touchpoints: Isis / Neurosis / OMG are a good basis for Zondervan’s and Chalice of Death’s grinding gears and gutturally chanted / shouted lyrics, courtesy of Skerik, though BP are neither as structured or minimal as those three acts can be, with a kind of rollicking momentum maintained by Previte and Saft that brings up something punkier like 5ive. Kabla’s blending of shrieks and sax as a layer of utter noise atop the growling rhythm team is what sounds most like SUMAC, particularly their work with Keiji Haino, whereas the broken, stuttering, black-clad desperation of closer Burning Witch broaches even harsher Khanate territory.

Though while I’m basing most of this on comparison, it’s mainly to fully shake you out of a “jazz” mindset: knowing the group’s members history clarifies how / why some of the tracks (particularly Zondervan and Kabla) can feel a bit overlong – not that I’d necessarily want to characterize jazz improv as overlong, but I think some of the nuance of “unplugged” instruments in that genre allow that approach to feel more like a game of trading the spotlight and the lead. Here, the absolute volume of the band just makes it a little confusing – like, are they going for drone, are they building towards something…?, and when Previte or Saft ends up driving it back home you realize they’re following those same jazz pursuits, and I don’t know that mixer Randall Dunn was necessarily focused on bringing that out.

But back to saying – Beta Popes stand on their own. They have a sound that you can pick out as unique alongside all of those comparisons, and it’s one that absolutely earns the doom metal tag.