Somnambule - Writing About Music

Beans ~ Now Soon Some Day

‘Structure Tone’ fades in fast like a sci-fi intruder alarm. Beans follows close behind with a lyrical urgency whose abstraction refuses straightforward interpretation. Try bringing your mind to bear on lines like:

“... Having a conversation w/ an ashtray
in comparison 2 each other,
they have nothing 2 say
insufficient as a pallbearer’s afterthought...”

and you might just find it repelled like a like-to-like magnet. No worries though – who needs straightforward? ‘Win Or Lose You Lose’ is constructed from smooth, shiny plastics and rubberised metals. This track’s laced with references to the wilfulness of smoking, maybe the alienation from a daughter and Beans’ strengths as an mc:

“... captured on tape yet the prose
remain fluid unaffected by shape
no rule a roof w/ no walls...”

Beans is travelling in electronica territory with curvilinear tones that strain at their edges. His rhythms and rhymes are marshal, hectic, dystopian. Think Tubeway Army spiced and spliced with raga’s unrelenting rhythms and vocal delivery with the end result produced by the Neptunes.

Now Soon Some Day is a mini-album 33 minutes long, but full to the brim, demanding to be heard and demanding to listen to – a single minute more might tip the balance and be too much. Beans delivers great titles - Mutescreamer, Databreaker, Gold Skull - and moving emotional honesty when talking about his upbringing and parents (Crevice). Top it off with a couple of Prefuse73 remixes in Uprock and Vocal Narratives mode and tasty Warp packaging and Beans delivers an unstoppable sucker punch.

Colin Buttimer
February 2004
Published by Absorb