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“The Beaten Sea’s songs certainly conjure testier times, but, as a whole, they make for a joyous collection. And, in turn, this new outfit has not only offered up the finest area debut of the year, but also a contender for the finest album we’ve heard in 2010, period.” -The Dallas Observer
The majority of Beaten Sea’s growing audience first made their acquaintance in any one of a now countless number of stripped-down house shows, scrunched up in narrow living rooms, their attentive brows hovering near the band’s knees, microphones thrown to the curb long ago. In a city worn to boredom from the alternative glut of the mid ‘90s, it is fitting that musical authenticity in Dallas would find purpose again roaming from house to house like a hobbled ghost. The Beaten Sea know that they’re privileged to be part of this new undertaking, lugging that old spirit around in a banjo case in a city over which looms the forgotten specters of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Their hauntingly appealing sound would convince the most rational skeptic that ghosts and spirits are surely wandering among us. They believe in the ghosts of dead loves, prophetic crickets, and humming sirens, the characters in their songs tiptoe through a shaky world held together by a grace that most often touches us with the business end of an axe. The Beaten Sea know that skin is for touching, trees are for chopping down, fingers for chopping off, man made for toil, fists made for beating away nightmares. It all happens within the sounds and words of the ordinary, made alive with the supernatural, like a chorus of mystic clodhoppers.
The writer Harry Crews once posited that the simplest Southern conversation is theological. Dallas is not the South and none of the members of The Beaten Sea are from Georgia, but their music wears the same habit. Whether they are reciting Apocalypse or channeling Dostoevsky’s dialogue with the Devil, The Beaten Sea’s songs sweat with God-talk, wrapped in the timeworn melodies of American music at its purest.
