Ross Beach – Ascension Parish (A Bouncing Space)

Though I first heard Louisiana-born and raised, now Portland, OR-based Beach on 2002’s You Make it Look So Easy (backed by his band The Hellpets), he’s made 15 solo LPs or mini-LPs; many of his earliest ones were limited-edition, cassette-only releases, like 1994’s blowout 27-song debut The Hand-Crafted Heart Sickness Calliope. He’s also played in a plethora (at least 18, per his website) of LA bands before moving to Portland, including a brief stint as guitarist with Jeff Mangum’s then-duo Neutral Milk Hotel in 1994. And while attending Louisiana Tech University with Mangum in the early 1990s, he collaborated with many like-minded musicians who eventually became part of the Elephant 6 collective. Ascension’s twinkly, terse “Mr. Tambourine Man”-evoking opener “Will Westbrook” wistfully reflects on one of them: Beach’s late Gerbils and Clay Bears bassist/guitarist bandmate, who died in 2006. Not only does the song recount Westbrook’s building of a music box at LTU’s [Charles] Wyly Tower of Learning (Westbrook was a “collector of bizarre photographic and musical equipment,” Beach notes on his website), it also references “five-foot photographs” of fellow college students “Eric, Scott, Bill, and Jeff” (I’m guessing 1992-94 Sons of Beach bandmate Eric Musgrove, Gerbils/NMH member Scott Spillane, also-deceased Olivia Tremor Control co-founder Bill Doss, and Mangum?).

Unlike the more rocking, full band-fueled You Make It Look, Ascension tilts towards Americana-tinged acoustic folk, with Beach handling all the instruments except for backing vocalist Olivia Duffy’s mandolin. But he manages to make all 17 songs unique, each one strewn with his wry, witty wordplay, and delivered in his amiable drawl. Take the bouncy, whimsical “Laundry Lint,” in which a laid-back new lover’s laissez-faire laundry regimen helps to heal his OCD-ish overthinking, with lines like “You taught me not to care/Wash the shirts with the underwear.” And on the quivery “Relativity’s a Bitch,” he questions the validity of Albert Einstein’s famous theory for failing to explain how slow time moves when his girlfriend’s away (“I need your caring/But I feel as distant as Yuri Gregarin,” he complains), while the boisterous “The Internal Combustion Engine” is an amusing, animated account of Gottlieb Daimler’s trailblazing 1885 invention (sample line: “One vertical cylinder providing the force/Dropped it in a stagecoach and outsourced the horse”) and its adverse aftereffects.

Beach’s Deep South upbringing also provides occasional lyrical fodder. On “Southern Women,” he examines his bad luck with that region’s ladyfolk (“Maybe it’s because my truck’s too small,” he ponders) and on “Tuscaloosa,” he relates a typical weekend’s beer-buzzed (mis)adventure in ‘Bama’s boring, barren boondocks. Often, his outrageous outlook gives way to weightier worries. The rollicking “A World Without” (which proclaims “I don’t want to live in a world without Visqueen”; yeah, me neither!) and the “Hey Jude”-ish piano ballad “Is Society Crumbling?” both anxiously address our rapidly-changing, ringtone-obsessed culture. Meanwhile, the Heart “Barracuda”-chugging “Burn Wall Street” harangues white-collar hubris and the twangy “The Lives of People” puts down political perfidy and ill-considered corporate cronyism. If the humorously self-depreciating closer “My Siren Song” suggests that his tunes are his only surefire method of “luring us in,” then there are plenty such enticements on Ascension. (rossbeach.bandcamp.com)

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