The Beta Band's forte, aside from occasionally making remarkable music, lies in not liking things. At least so you might think from reading interviews with them, for given half a chance the quartet tends to betray an almost pathological desire to complain: about the rubbish state of pop music today, for instance, or the groups they reckon have ripped them off, or the perfidious behavior of their record company. This yen for negation reached its logical conclusion in 1999 when they denounced their gvm debut album as a meretricious piece of work, the worst that would be released all year. Why? The record company didn't give them enough money they claimed. Nonsense, came the retort, it was the group's demands that were too extravagant — such as wanting to make a double LP with each of the four sides recorded in a different continent. Whatever the truth of the matter, the result was that the band punctured much of the excitement they had generated earlier in their career. At their best, they're a quixotically imaginative pop group — with an ability to combine styles creatively — but when it doesn't gel, as on that first album, you get self-indulgence and a frustrating sense of wasted promise.