Review Summary: This corporation needs a new I&D department.
Inspiration and innovation can both be fickle mistresses, especially if combined; while such a combination is not impossible to maintain in the long run, cases of artists eventually faltering in their efforts to do so far outnumber the success stories across every creative field.
Sadly, on their fourth release under their current denomination (and eighth overall) instrumental psych-rock gurus Bearded Executive appear to have stumbled upon precisely such a hurdle; for, while nothing on
Procedure Applies can be called outright bad, everything does sound more than a little stagnant, as if the well of inspiration had finally run dry for the dynamic duo - much like it did for their former outfit, Barfighter, at precisely the same point in their fledgling career.
Indeed, while the band's trademark tropes – the guitar tone, the shrill, squealing leads, the chunky and involved bass, the ever-improving and now fairly organic-sounding programmed percussion – remain present, accounted for and fundamentally unchanged, that is precisely where the problem lies: everything across these three songs and thirteen minutes of music is exactly what is expected of this band at this point, no more and no less. What attempts at innovation, however misguided, the duo had attempted on previous records are conspicuously absent this time around, replaced by stodgy, safe comfort-zone songwriting which, while fundamentally as pleasant as ever, fails to elicit the same excitement as some of the band's previous recordings, especially those created during the Barfighter period. In fact, it stands as more than a little ironic (not to mention frustrating) that the most innovative thing about the band's fourth extended play is the absence, for the first time in the band's discography, of the eponymous bearded mascot on the album cover - unless, of course, that is
his skull on the cover, still chained to the same clock which ended up being the death of him.
What is even worse, the songs on
Procedure Applies feel, more than ever, like unfinished, extended warm-up jams committed to tape and passed off as songs; while Bearded Executive were never the tightest band, compositionally speaking, never have their tracks felt quite this much like loose, disjointed snippets of ideas which the group could not be bothered to attempt gelling into actual songs. Similarly, while the duo have certainly established a trademark sound across their two projects, they were always able to present relatively fresh-sounding ideas each time around, justifying multiple spins of each of their previous records; not so here. Most, if not all, of what is presented on
Procedure genuinely feels like a rehash of what the group has created on their previous three releases – not just in the same sonic ballpark, as might have been expectable, but actively recycled, with only the most desultory of coats of paint applied over it – a sad state of affairs for musicians once synonymous with innovation in the field of instrumental hard rock.
In short, then, Bearded Executive's fourth release is also their weakest by a considerable margin, and the first to come off as actively disappointing. Hopefully, this will only have been a temporary setback, and this corporation will soon be back to its previous production standards; otherwise, one cannot help but think these Bearded Executives might have hit a downward trend from which they may find it hard to recover...
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