CD Review: Meet the Beagles – The Beagles

13 years ago Liv Carter Comments Off on CD Review: Meet the Beagles – The Beagles

Meet the Beagles – The Beagles

 

In a town like Nashville, where many extremely talented musicians are carving out their own careers, the most amazing things happen when some of them decide to join forces.

Matt Nolen, Rick Huckaby and Ward Davis are all respected songwriters in their own right. Bundled together in new trio The Beagles, they have given us, with Meet the Beagles, one of the freshest, yet still warmly familiar sounding, records of the year.

All ten tracks were written solely by them in the space of only three songwriting sessions, which is at once a testament to their talent, and a lesson in the virtue of simplicity. Nothing about this is pretentious or even hints at an ambition greater than just making music and having fun. And this, along with supreme songwriting, is the album’s (and The Beagles’!) great strength.

The songs’ quality was evident even when I heard the not-quite-finished version of some of these songs. Putting wonderful melodies, great hooks and true-to-life lyrics to good use, these guys know how to craft songs that stay with you. Their wit is so sharp and their charm so irresistible that any phrase which could have come across as a snide comment still manages to sound good.

From whimsical ‘Screen Door Blues’, and ‘Wake Up Mama’s version of domestic bliss, to the hilarious ‘Naked,’ humour plays a big role. Relationship hits and misses are the topic of conversation here with the latter winning out, whether anticipating the end (‘Leavin’ Comin”), or positively welcoming it on ‘Lonely Sounds Alright,’ one of the stand-outs.

The play with language, rhyme, metaphor and analogy is superb, and I will hold ‘Leave,’ soaked in cynicism as it it, up as one of many possible examples: ‘and our love was like the autumn trees/it was so good to see you…leave’, and the girl isn’t let off the hook without a further sneer ‘you left your diary, what a shame/reading all about what’s-his-name/could you tell him hello from me’.

The power of great writing is used on ‘Won’t Slow Down,’ in which a guy who really ought to be an unsympathetic character wins you over, and on the sarcastic non-compliment of ‘Nobody Does it Like You,’ where you don’t even need to hear the girl’s story because you’re already siding with the guy. In the midst of all this, there is even room for a really sweet love song in the form of ‘Kiss You’. The album closes with ‘Beagle Tonight’ which I can’t even begin to describe; this one just needs to be heard.

The Beagles co-produced the disc and also enlisted the well-documented talents of Music Row producer Butch Carr and fellow musicians Chad Cromwell (on drums) and Glen Worf (on bass) to help complete this first project. If some of the great music from the 1960s and ’70s had to be redone for the modern era, it would sound like this. There is not one superfluous note on here, and each song is allowed to be just what it wants to be, thereby creating a cohesive whole out of ten distinct tunes.

Meet the Beagles, a debut CD put together a mere six months after the band first formed (how very un-Nashville!), is extraordinarily impressive. And hopefully it can serve as inspiration to others to ditch all formulas and formats and just get back to making music, all while having an enormous amount of fun!

To listen, enjoy, fall in love with, and subsequently buy a copy of Meet the Beagles, head over to the band’s Reverbnation page here!

Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
Liv Carter

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