Bettie Serveert
“We don’t have much to show for life,” Van Dyk sings on “Wide Eyed Fools,” the opening track on the band’s newest disc, Log 22. “Not a perfect home, not a perfect wife.” That chorus swells with overwhelming conviction, but the verses that lead up to it seem deliberately unfocused. Visser’s guitar lick scuttles away from a sole organ chord, a series of hi-hat taps is followed by an offbeat snare hit–the music seems to shrink from its inevitable anthemic fate. “Freaks like us know the ins and outs,” Van Dyk continues. Then the confused structure of the verses kicks back in for the coda, where she mutters a monologue about depression. The song is the band’s clearest statement of purpose since “Tom Boy,” from their 1992 debut, Palomine, and it’s just as defiant, though far more nuanced.
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The music had a heartiness I lacked. I was fragile, in a state I never want to return to. (The emotional state, I mean, not Jersey, though I’m in no hurry to go back there either.) I wanted to be as nonchalant about my own fuckuppery as Van Dyk and Visser sounded on “Sugar the Pill.” “Isn’t this great,” Van Dyk sings, “We played it off the cuff / And what an escape / Before it got too rough,” as Visser’s country licks lazily circle the melody and then wander off, distracted. (When she concludes “Surviving is an awful lot,” I’m still not sure if she means it’s a big deal or a terrible fate. Probably both–that’s what puns are for, avoiding the reductive insistence of concrete language.) When Visser’s note-clotted rumble shot out of a drumroll like a spitball out of a straw on “Misery Galore,” I craved that momentum.
If you haven’t listened to Bettie Serveert since Palomine, though, Log 22 might well leave you cold. I like this band a lot, in case you haven’t noticed, and they figure prominently in my personal mythology, so I find myself stuck between making a case for their continued significance and just letting you know how much they mean to me. Where I hear a band quietly dedicated to a life without guarantees, it’s possible that, as the woman says, all you’re ever gonna see here is a pallet full of broke-down tunes. The meandering detours and the occasional dud lyric are all part of an aesthetic I respond to. Our lives are full of filler, of verses that take too long to get to the chorus, of solos we aren’t sure how to end. When I first heard Dust Bunnies, it persuaded me that the mess I’d made of my life was something worth piecing back together. Seeing Bettie Serveert again, in a performance that contained no unnecessary drama yet no false resolutions, reminded me that the mess is my life.
