Be
Thistupidream (Brother Yorick)

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2003

With a singer who sounds as far removed again from Michael Penn as Michael Penn is from John Lennon and the ability to work in whatever style they choose so long as it’s some unthreatening form of alt-rock, Be make it awfully hard to get enough of a bead on them to care about anything they do. Their sound changes so drastically from song to song on Thistupidream that the album falls apart, although the band itself remains unscathed; Be have a pretty good handle on just about everything they try. And they try everything: “Raincoat” sounds like the pre-throwdown sections of “Paranoid Android,” “Confession” starts off like “Man In The Moon” before throwing damn near every other Sugar song into the mix and “Bargain” besides, “Driving To The Beach” is like a Nirvana song played by the Posies, and so on, and so forth. It’s ultimately “The Night You Faked Your Own Death” that seems to reveal the band’s true aspiration: to be the next Vertical Horizon. Like that band or Remy Zero, Be reside in that nebulous zone inhabited by perfectly capable musicians recording perfectly serviceable songs that have nothing really to recommend them regardless.

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