Beatenberg’s The Hanging Gardens Of Beatenberg — Celebrating a decade of world-class timeless tunes

In the opening month of 2014, an unknown trio from Cape Town released an album that is as flawless an album as any of these — and as enduring. Introducing us to the songwriting, singing and guitaring of Matthew Field and the impeccable rhythm section of Ross Dorkin (bass) and Robin Brink (drums), Beatenberg’s The Hanging Gardens Of Beatenberg celebrates a decade of being in the world this year and, 10 years on, it remains a record of inestimable stature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ZuQsCNlRU

If you were being quarrelsome you could insist on classifying the album — and the band’s subsequent output — as “indie pop” because you can easily picture a record store employee filing it in the same rack as The Shins and Vampire Weekend with a quietly satisfied smile. 

Or maybe even guitar pop, so central is Field’s extraordinary playing to the 13 songs on the album. Singular in sound but subtly evocative of South African forebears, for instance Marks Mankwane and Bright Blue’s Tom Fox, and influences like Paul Simon — and drawing from the jazz that was part of Field’s studies at UCT’s College of Music (Dorkin and Brink were also students there, although Brink and Field had first started playing together while at high school), Field’s guitaring can be described as virtuosic. (“At times he’s playing the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic parts of the song all at once — and, incredibly, he’s also singing,” remarked a music teacher friend to me, in amazement.) 

But here’s the thing: it never comes off as alienatingly highbrow, so fully does Field’s guitar playing inhabit the boundaries of the best pop songs — be they indie pop or guitar pop or pop pop — which invite music lovers to listen over and over again and to sing along, unabashedly, at the top of their lungs (as you’ll encounter if you ever find yourself at a live Beatenberg performance).

The Hanging Gardens… opens — improbably — with a song about tennis. And an Italian Renaissance painter. 

Right from when Field sings: “Sometimes it feels like heaven and sometimes it feels like hell/But you keep on going until it gets hard to tell/And your body moves with the grace of an archangel/Like a stroke of genius from Raphael,” you know you’re in the hands of an uncommon lyricist. 

Through a telling of Rafael Nadal’s match against Rolex-sponsored Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2008, when the young Spanish player beat his Swiss rival in a four-hour-48-minute epic (at that point the longest Wimbledon final in history),“Rafael” captures humanity’s collective awe at rare acts of accomplishment — strokes of genius, be it in the game of tennis or the art of a painter like Raphael. 

At the time we didn’t know it, but Field is an accomplished tennis player, and the game surfaces in newer material.

“Remember when I came to watch you play/I remember you won 6 love, 6-1/On that burning summer day” on Eau De Toilette off this year’s The Great Fire of Beatenberg — so his warm-ups and serves in the lyric video for Rafael were not the stuff of pantomime but glimpses of the artist as a player of a different sort.

For the listener, if there’s a dominant lyrical theme on the album, it is love. 

But in Field’s hands, it is no common or garden take on the tangled emotion that lives in most pop songs, from the pedestrian to those that are burnished in our minds forever. 

Here, love is present in all its great and limited, deep and superficial forms — true romantic love, tough love, idealised love, obsessive love, narcissistic self-love, love as a complex, not reliably healthy preoccupation, love as a weapon (“Well Helen you know your beauty’s like a tightened bow”). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MjmKPYatOU

On Facebook Apologia, our narrator references Socrates and hemlock as he grapples with being betwixt and between desiring the simplicity of holding his lover as she falls asleep, but also leaving the question of where his love lies open ended (“In an age of Facebook apologies/I’m in love with you, I’m in love.”)

On Echoes, mistrust blooms as the narrator contemplates a lover only hanging around for possible influence down the line (“Will you write down everything that I say?/Will you write down everything that I do?”) and All About Me reveals a skittishness about the schizophrenic nature of modern living (“I had an afternoon nap/Then I had a panic attack/I changed my profile picture/Then later I changed it back”) and also recalls Rafael in its lines, “You know it’s all about me/I cannot even explain/All the images in my brain/It’s like pleasure but it’s like pain.”

The Hanging Gardens is strewn with evidence of Field’s love of the written word, transmitted through lyrics that are poetic, literary, but never in service of anything other than delivering a song that the songwriter himself loves, that caused him to feel, at the moment of writing, the very thing the song is conveying. 

“The poem is an essay that lacks rigour,” Field tells us in Beauty Like A Tightened Bow (a song that’s a peak showcase of Brink’s superb and sensitively wrought drumming and Dorkin’s lush, anchoring bass) and when he sings “You found freedom/In a chamber of the library/You take the roots up/With the old etymology/In Kefalonia/And the blue Ionian sea/The way I know ya/Is like an old old olive tree” on Ithaca we are caught in a startlingly redolent series of images that sweep us away like a 1940s romantic-novel-inspired film. 

The literary experience of the album — littered as it is with clues, codes and references — means that, after 10 years of living with it, it continues to yield fresh secrets and delights, inviting more nuanced readings of the lyrics over time (among them — is this the most self-reflective pop album ever written?)

Beatenberg took its name from a sketch of the Swiss town of Beatenberg that Field saw in a book of lectures by artist Paul Klee, and The Hanging Gardens tethers together a string of disparate, farflung locations including (the now designated dwarf planet) Pluto, the title of their indie house anthem with DJ Clock that netted four of the board-sweeping seven South African Music Awards (including Album of the Year, Best Pop Album and Duo or Group of the Year) that the band won in 2015. 

But for South Africans, there’s a particularly sweet pleasure in the album’s lyrical geography. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SynRkkJtVYY&list=PLLklbmGCrqoz4HvXuO0iYbKNzJuG7svqR&index=5

Elevating and exhilarating