Review Summary: Fully-throttled pony; noisy horse rock
The world needs more bands that call you a
fuckng idiot before they so much as kick in the door to stampede a fair shot at a first impression through your shoddily upholstered hall. Sure, a returning (bilingual) listener acquainted with betcover!! frontman Jiro Yanase's neurotic lyricism will know better than to take personal exemption to this – cagey fourth-wall shenanigans are practically a given coming from a man who spend the course of an album prophesying forgetting the fact of his own birth and laments entire dead stars' worth of sexual frustration sinking into his bare skin – but the scattergun force of the
baka yarō! that opens the book on
Uma's first track "Virtual Sex" is at the very least ballsy enough to leave questions intent ambiguous.
Nice! spits Yanase at the far side of the final chorus, at which point the song promptly expires before we even have time to process the syllable; his sardonic bombast proves an apt snapshot of meltdowns to come.
For the baffled layperson, betcover!! play alternative rock, a genre made occasionally excellent by its willingness to take verse-chorus guitar music outside the box, and routinely plagued by its failure to channel its creative potential to ends beyond ye olde anaemic bullshit-whinge. Yanase + co. navigate this pitfall through a cocktail of a) brute ambition to hit detonate on familiar forms, b) frankly superior songwriting in the cohesion and discipline with which they furnish new shapes for said forms, aided by auxiliary elements as noise rock, enka, jazz, samba and bossa nova, and c) prominent melancholic overtones lest one mistakes the zaniness of their stylistic juggle for the frayed ends of the sentiments underpinning it (anxiety, self-doubt, surreal bouts of loneliness, disorientation, etc.).
Confirm all of this through a once-through of betcover!!'s mini-masterpiece "Shima" on 2021's
Jikan, and then hold onto your hooves because their latest outing
Uma at once amplifies all the band's most rambunctious qualities, and pares them back into potentially their slickest package to date. This record flips the applecart on and strips the wheels from the grandiose songwriting of last year's
Tamago, rolling them headlong down the road like lateral spinning tops for the hell of seeing which one is fastest to keel over. It takes its title from the Japanese word for 'horse', an overpowered four-legged beast, in this case embodied in steroid-happy jazz rock, and so it be: jazz has never been so horselike (nor horses so rocklike)! From the churning bass eruption of "翔け夜の匂い草" (#2) to "火*りの踊り" (#5)'s momentous unpacking of Yura Yura Teikoku-adjacent psych rock, to the tumultuous denouement with which the album culminates on late highlight "炎天の日" (#7),
Uma digs its spurs in, hits the accelerator, and throttles that poor pony. It tramples obvious subtleties into the dirt, leaving behind a trail of (uh) subtle subtleties – betcover!! take the flashy side of their songcraft to such violent extents that one needs to work harder than usual to orient themselves around the web of maudlin undertones, and with eight songs at just under half an hour, the pacing verges on sadism. Across a cursory listen, you'll more likely to cotton onto individual moments than complete song-trajectories (the monster grooves in "鏡" (#3) and "火*りの踊り" (#5) immediately spring to mind), but dig in a little, and you'll find a vivid, nuanced personality behind those pyrotechnics.
Yanase is a crucial anchor here: one gains a lurid sense of his imagination through his lyricism, which runs postmodern contortions of subject matter through the archaic register associated with traditional enka. The word-to-word of this is, uh, oblique at numerous points, but the man's command of a memorable image ranges from grotesque still lifes ("翔け夜の匂い草" (#2)) all the way to the gates of hell (which he affords multiple appearances). He sticks the landing through sheer pathos, grounding his melodrama and melancholy in earnest tones and offering the latter a valuable spotlight in the relatively straightforward closer "Mexican Papa". The album's final lines in particular are beautifully crafted – but, Japanophone or not, there's a pronounced emotional centre here that affords betcover!!! an easy edge over practically any other contemporary '70s-leaning jazz-rock pastiche act I can think of (says he, recalling Black Midi and smiling mid-eyeroll).
Uma may be a tad flighty in its pacing, but it's a welcome and remarkably well-placed addition to the band's oeuvre: while every other track on
Tamago kept the listener waiting for the Next Big Thing, this one just runs out of sight.
