The Beaten Sea

There's quite the folk scene brewing in Dallas these days, and much of the credit for the genre's rebirth can be given to the so-called Dallas Family Band, which, among its rotating players, counts Jacob Metcalf, The Fox and The Bird, Something in the Wheel, Lalagray and The Beaten Sea. It's the last act listed among that crop that bears the onus of being the first to provide an album that can be taken away from the sing-alongs that these outfits' shows so often become. On its self-titled, full-length debut, The Beaten Sea proves it's up to the task, and not just because, like its cohorts, this outfit's catalog is inherently catchy and memorable. Rather, The Beaten Sea stands out from its collaborators (many of whom appear in backing roles on the disc) because the duo of Benj Pocta and Jamie Wilson aims to take listeners on a journey to a dusty 1800s landscape, when its banjo- and acoustic guitar-picking aren't just the norm, but a welcome salve from the time's hardships. Wilson and Pocta's vocals both capably show the strains of the difficult times they aim to recreate, with Pocta's standing out as especially road-worn and compelling—and it more than does the trick on songs like "Doctor's Not Gonna Cure Our Ills," "Grave Clothes," "Lonesome Tune," "Serpent Song" and "It's Hard to Resist," all of which set this troubled scene impeccably and share compelling parables. It helps that, unlike in a live setting, the band is joined here by drums and full-on accompaniment, but it's the honesty behind these songsmiths' tunes that stands out. The Beaten Sea's songs certainly conjure testier times, but, as a whole, they make for a joyous collection. And, in turn, this new outfit has not only offered up the finest area debut of the year, but also a contender for the finest album we've heard in 2010, period. - Dalllas Observer

DALLAS — The Beaten Sea does not stand alone. They’re part of the Dallas Family Band, which, to the naked eye, seem like some old-fashioned troupe tra-la-la-ing across the countryside, playing lutes and tin whistles to passersby. It's pretty much what they did at the Flaming Lips show at NX35: traversing the North Texas Fairgrounds, playing music for whomever would listen. Seeing them live in their earnest work shirts, the working-man’s beards, and the pork-pie hats can also lead one to jump to some conclusions about their music: It must all sound like sea shanties and dusty country tunes. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that. Even if there were, the various artists that make up the Dallas Family Band – The Fox and The Bird, Jacob Metcalf, LalaGray, et al. – possess the ability to rise above any marginalization or pigeonholing. And so do The Beaten Sea. The debut album is peppered with songs many might expect from a modern “folk” outfit. “Hard to Resist” is a touching sing along that could easily have been borrowed from a hymn, and the banjo strums of “One Last Night for Birthpains” and “Living with your Ghost” and pedal steel of “It’s a Long Ways” tie it closely to good ol’ country music and could leave one thinking they’re just trying to recreate the past. The waters of The Beaten Sea, however, run much deeper. They’re not interested in preserving the past, or even in recreating their “live experience” with their first album. They build on their live sound right out of the gate, a move that most bands don’t take until two or three releases down the line. They add drums and electric bass, and open up arrangements on most of the songs so that they could fit comfortably on any Wilco or Elvis Costello album. The record is stocked with all-around great tunes like “That Lonesome Tune,” “Serpent Song,” and “Hatchet,” which expand the scope of the album and offer continued rewards each listen. It’s a surprisingly mature album for a local debut, one that should help to further establish The Beaten Sea, and the Dallas Family Band, as Dallas institutions. - PegasusNews.com

As far as this review goes, my objectivity is a hopelessly ruined thing. The Beaten Sea have played shows in my apartment (three times) on a plywood stage I built with my own girlishly small hands. And I wish I could say the musical connection happened before the interpersonal, but it didn’t. The first time Benj Pocta, then a good friend, invited me to one of his young band’s shows, I searched my brain for a workable excuse not to go. Friends’ bands’ shows are normally pitiable events that later obligate your disingenuous praise. To my glad surprise, I discovered that Dallas’ The Beaten Sea, comprised primarily of Jamie Wilson and Benj Pocta, were legitimate and prolific musical alchemists, fashioning precious metals from simple, wooden melodies. That first show turned me from friend to the sort of groupie who browses Home Depot for stage material. The majority of Beaten Sea’s growing audience first made the band’s acquaintance in any one of a now countless number of stripped-down house shows – scrunched up in narrow living rooms, their attentive brows hovering near the band’s knees, microphones thrown to the curb. The Beaten Sea are unofficial members of an unofficial cooperative known as The Dallas Family Band, listing among its disciples The Fox and The Bird, Jacob Metcalf, lalagray, and a number of variations I can never keep straight. A dogged do-it-yourself community, The Dallas Family Band is a collective of day-jobbers who turn gypsy at night, frequently swapping band members, willing to play in any house with an open door for music’s sake alone. In a city worn to boredom from the alternative glut of the mid ’90s, it is fitting that musical authenticity in Dallas would find purpose again roaming from house to house like a hobbled ghost. The Beaten Sea know that they’re privileged to be part of this new undertaking, lugging that old spirit around in a banjo case in a city over which looms the forgotten specters of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The bearded, booted Beaten Sea are a country band. They have several years of music-making ahead of them and several dozen writers to encumber them with unnecessary adjectives, but for now “country” is apt enough. Country is a true, American art that Nashville drugged and violated and lobotomized until it danced voodoo-like in a designer tank-top. “The best country songs,” Jamie Wilson asserts, “were written by those who had lost the country.” That’s what The Beaten Sea achieves on this album — getting back to the search for a purity that, as Wilson sings, “just ain’t pure no more.” The Beaten Sea are not the first or only band to go mining for country dust beneath all those Dallas parking lots. They’re just the best to do it lately. I won’t hear that The Beaten Sea don’t believe in actual ghosts. Their self-titled debut album would convince the most rational skeptic. They believe in ghosts of dead loves, prophetic crickets, and humming sirens. The Beaten Sea believe in the flames of damnation that people run alternatingly to and from. The characters in their songs tiptoe through a shaky world held together by a whispery grace that most often touches us with the business end of an axe. The Beaten Sea know that skin is for touching, trees are for chopping down, fingers for chopping off, man made for toil, fists made for beating away nightmares. It all happens within the sounds and words of the ordinary, made alive with the supernatural, like a chorus of mystic clodhoppers. The writer Harry Crews once posited that the simplest Southern conversation is theological. Dallas is not the South and none of the members of the Beaten Sea are from Georgia, but their music wears the same habit. Whether they are reciting Apocalypse or channeling Dostoevsky’s dialogue with the Devil, The Beaten Sea’s songs sweat with God-talk, wrapped in the timeworn melodies of American music at its purest. - D Magazine