Origin's Not Destination: Beauty Pill's Chad Clark appeared yesterday on the podcast 99% Invisible to discuss the group's Immersive Ideal project at Artisphere. Listen, laugh at the joke about slow vs. non-slow disco, and then scroll to the bottom, where you'll find a premiere of "Afrikaner Barista," which is the first song on the group's [...]
Slow news day, slow news day. But there are a few musical goodies circulating that are pegged to Martin Luther King Day. On Friday, I mentioned that local producer Jon Kwest released the moombahton edit "Drum Major," which applies some 108 bpm to King's haunting "Drum Major Instinct" sermon.
D.C. rapper yU included the empowerment jam [...]
I lead this week's arts section with my longish look at Beauty Pill's summer experiment in recording an album in public. Eve Ottenberg reviews The Color of My Soul, Melanie S. Hatter's novel of identity and self-discovery in a small southwest Virginia town (it won the Washington Writers' Publishing House's annual prize in 2011). Tricia Olszewski [...]
Photo Slideshow: Beauty Pill's "Immersive Ideal"
It was nearly 1 p.m. on the eighth day of Beauty Pill’s public experiment in creativity and captivity when Morgan Klein, a photographer and friend of the band, looked up from his laptop and announced the sad news: Amy Winehouse was dead.
“That’s terrible,” the group’s leader, Chad Clark, said genuinely. She [...]
Nov. 21 is basically Punk Rock Day. There's the new Evens 7-inch, which is the first release from the duo of Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina in five years, and the new Office of Future Plans full-length, the debut of the J. Robbins-led quartet—both releases are out on Dischord Records. Also out that day is [...]
Since mid-July, D.C. art-rockers Beauty Pill have been holed up in Artisphere's Black Box Theatre recording a new album. I've filed a few dispatches. Today is the band's final day there, and it's worth stopping by the building's third-floor observation window anytime until about 10 p.m., so that you can look in on the sessions [...]
It's Thursday, and Beauty Pill is working on "Near Miss Stories"—the band's only song that addresses the illness that nearly killed frontman Chad Clark in 2007 and 2008. "You’re in a desperate situation," says Clark, explaining the lyrics. "You’re in a shipwreck, you’re out at sea, holding onto a piece of wood. You’re at the [...]
It's Tuesday afternoon at Artisphere, and Beauty Pill is advancing the song "When Cornered" from Beatles circa 1967 (frontman Chad Clark's demo of the song is rich in sitar-like sounds and "Lucy in the Sky" lilt) to Beatles circa 1968. Specifically: a layered guitar line that's poppy and hyper-chromatic and heavy and messy. It also [...]
"I come bearing caffeine. Caffeine! Caffeina!" announces Chad Clark near the top of his band's first day in Artisphere's Black Box Theatre, where his band Beauty Pill is holed up for most of the rest of the month to complete its next album, and where runs to the Starbucks down the street are both required [...]
Beauty Pill's Chad Clark likes to say that "Ann the Word" changed his life. The song, a haunting and cinematic demo the band posted to its MySpace in 2006, was a sharp left turn from the band's earlier material—and Clark says the positive response to "Ann the Word" has influenced the band's direction since. You'll [...]
