Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Honesty is a virtue, not many people can pull it off with sincerity or without the guilt riding along on its coat tails, pulling back the emotions and looking openness in the eye; for many, honesty is bordering on cruel, they wrap it up in sentiments of the well worn phrase “I don’t sugar coat my words” or “I tell it how it is”, without even giving a thought to how the other person might react. Honesty is a virtue, but being unkind and purposely vicious in the same sentence is the most despicable of acts.
For Digbeth quintet Beaumont, Honestly is offered in the benevolent, the compassionate, it understands that for some opening their heart to the world is not an act of selfishness, the need for validation or comfort, it is responding to the pain or the suffering they feel. To be anything but gentle to this deed is to show that cruelty and sense of snide has become your way of life, a blister that requires popping less it infects the surrounding skin.
Honestly is that compassionate wrapped in gorgeous rock riffs, of showing no mercy to the air surrounding the instrument and the vocal but allowing resilience of spirit to take on the callous and blackheart brigade; if honesty if a virtue then Honestly is the quality we should all strive for.
Birmingham’s Digbeth area is steeped in history, musically, artistically and socially, it is a history that sees it as part of the build up of what people recognise as modern Birmingham, the home of Birmingham Irish culture is there, the Institute, that fine venue of local music learning and sweat driven nights, has placed many a band on the road to salvation and The Big Bull’s Head was renowned for being a place of poetry and the odd rock night for the up and coming. Into that rich and diverse social history comes Beaumont, the sense of emerging from a tangled, intricately weaved web, gives the band the direction of where they have come from and the power to truly step up to the plate.
The dour and the often miserable is mistaken for being in the mind as unkempt, not being part of the scene in which it wants to reflect to the outside world, yet dig underneath that rampant surface of Beaumont, place yourself between the once industrial powerhouse and its dark surrounding streets, the comfort of the knowing you could escape at any time via a National Express from the bus station or at least gorge yourself on one of the finest curries in the land right opposite. It is that fuels and sustains Spencer Edmonds, Jake Murray, Chris Inston, Reece Aleksander and Mitchell Dornan as they make songs such as Satellites, Rosemary, Dependent and the smashing misnomer of Happiness/Joy their gift to the outside world.
It is a gift that makes Honestly such a dramatic statement, one in which the band live fully up to the history that surrounds them.
Beaumont will release the E.P Honestly on Via Reclaim Music on September 15th 2017.
Ian D. Hall