MySpace Trawl - Betamaxx

It’s odd what you find by mistake. Whilst looking for the remote control the other day, we managed to find a few weapons of mass destruction, five pencils complete with chew marks and a sandwich.

It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it was as a pleasant surprise. Apart from the WMDs though, we are now sprouting unusual amounts of body hair and we’ve have had the UN round for a chat over a pot of herbal tea. 

Anyway, we were recently searching Google for 'betamax' for a completely random reason, and up popped a link to the band Betamaxx. And they're ace. Yay.

Don’t ask us why we wanted to look up facts about an ancient form of videotape, but the results were much more pleasing then we first anticipated. And so were our expectations. We assumed we’d get hip-hop, but we couldn’t be more wrong. Just like usual really. 

As the song loaded up before the page did, we instantly realised we were dealing with something to do with electronic music. Be in something to do with the genre itself, or incorporating the style with something else. If it had been the latter, we would have buggered off the page after a minute of listening. In our experience, it’s hard to do two things well. 

Once the page loaded and we could probe a bit further into Betamaxx, we learned that they hailed from Bristol. And if you didn’t know, Bristol is a mecca for good music. Bristol's Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead created trip-hop, for example, and we've even trawled Bristol's own Kid Carpet early last year. 

It’s never the easiest thing to describe something to someone. Simply saying that Betamaxx deal with electronic music mixed with real instruments like guitars, drums and bass is rather vague. After repeated listens to the track Sex Disco it seems clear to us that they are a harder version of Hot Chip and a rougher version of LCD Soundsystem.

There are no complicated personal weepy lyrics involved that go on and on, either. Just straight to the point lyrics that don’t insult the intelligence of the listener. A track from their MySpace wouldn’t be out of place on any compilation. Four tracks are up there and, if you like, you can even download them for free and spread the joy of Betamaxx!

Read more: 

Betamaxx MySpace page