Description

TO LOVE IS TO LIVE, Beth’s new solo album—written and produced with Savages producer (and Beth’s longtime partner) Johnny Hostile—is not a Savages record by another name. Beth sidelines the grimy, distorted guitar and reaches for a more diverse palette, including strobe-like synths, downy woodwinds, and inscrutable snippets of found sound. But there are constants: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is rife with the same livewire intensity, the same embrace of tensions and apparent contradictions. Lyrically and musically, it vacillates between the corporeal and the ethereal, prudence and excess, softness and severity. Its various parts could fill out the whole character alignment grid from lawful good to chaotic evil. If not always love, they demonstrate fascination with the full spectrum of human experience and beyond.