By Roddy Isles

Hands up anyone who expected The Beta Band to come crashing back into view riding the back of a guitar riff that The Edge may have shied away from for being too monolithic? Nope, didn’t think so.

But then with The Beta Band it’s always been a case of not knowing quite what to expect. We also couldn’t have guessed that, as well as being armed with that riff on which storming new single Assessment arrives, they’d be coming back in the guise of Marvel superheroes.

This all comes as part of the band’s grand return with their first album in three years, since 2001’s Hot Shots II, which seems far too long to be missing a group of their talent. “I do bump into people and they ask if we are still together,” admitted the band’s John Maclean. “We did need a bit of time off to go and do other things before we got back on the treadmill again. We did a really long tour after the last album, and we needed a break after that.”

Now the batteries have been recharged. Assessment is the first single, and something of a statement of intent.

“On Hot Shots, we restrained ourselves in a way,” said John, one of the three members in the band to hail from Fife. “We wanted to get more of an r&b feel on that album and stay away from guitars, or at least stay away from making it loud and rough. When we were making this album we took those restraints off.

“This time it’s more like the sort of attitude we had back when we were making the songs that went on The 3 EPs, where we just put in whatever we felt the song needed.”

On Assessment, that means big, crunching guitars. Throughout the rest of the album—which is titled Heroes To Zeroes—you get a kaleidoscope of inventive samples, barking dogs, crashing drums, and multi-layered vocals. If that has you running scared of a repeat of their debut album proper, which they roundly dismissed as a mess upon completing it, worry not, for this time they’ve stayed in control of the magic experiments they set-up.

“The first album was a difficult one to make, and really it shows, although if you go back I think there’s still some good stuff on there,” said John. “This time around, we were much better prepared. We really did a lot of work before we went near the studio, and by the time we went in, we were already armed with what were effectively finished demos.

“We recorded 17 songs this time—which were all of a pretty good standard—we then worked that down to 12. In the past, largely because of the way we worked, we just did 10 or 12 songs that then ended up on the album.”

The 12 they eventually selected to make up Heroes To Zeroes are a cracking bunch. This perhaps still isn’t quite the genius album we’ve been waiting on The Beta Band making since they first made a splash with the opening song of their debut EP, Dry The Rain, but it’s full of treats nonetheless.

At one end of the scale lies Wonderful, one of the most simply gorgeous things they’ve ever recorded. At the other is Liquid Bird, which sounds like Spiritualized being given a bit of a brutal drum’n’bass re-rub. In between is a marriage of all the elements they have spent years trying to harness.

“Heroes To Zeroes represents a true marriage of samples, programmed beats and a live band,” said singer Steve Mason. “This is something we’ve been working towards since the beginning. We’ve carried on trying to hone our sound down to a pop song and are learning to make it tighter and more exciting.”

It’s not just within the music that they are learning. The Beta Band haven’t always played an easy game with the music Press, and the result has been that they’ve had what John identifies as something of an image problem.

Hardly a page written about The Beta Band turns without several inevitable, yet invariably not quite accurate, keywords being typed out.

“We do have to get a different image across,” said John. “It does get annoying when every time you see something written about yourselves it is in this one-dimensional role of oddball, stoner, moody-grumpy Beta Band. It always seems to be those things, when really I don’t think that describes us at all.

“We’ve just had two years away from this and I’ve been relaxing into a life of normality, going down the pub for a drink and playing football maybe a couple of times a week. And then you come back to this and see people saying you are weird or moody. It is quite bizarre.”

Maybe the superhero thing will sort it out, and remind people of the large streak of fun that runs through much of what this frequently remarkable band does.

For the artwork for Heroes To Zeroes they went to the home of the superhero, Marvel Comics, to get themselves drawn in the mould of earth-saving immortals.

“None of us are really comic nerds, but as soon as we got the title of Heroes To Zeroes, we thought it would be great if we could get something done in a comic style,” said John. “So we approached this guy at Marvel Comics, Kaare Andrews, who does a lot of comic covers and stuff for them, and he said he’d do it.

“I think it has come out great.” Of course that’s the sort of reaction you’d expect from a man who’s just been given an ultra-cool Cyclops-style eye laser!

They may not quite be able to adopt those personas when they head out on tour at the end of this month, a jaunt which includes two Scottish dates at Glasgow Barrowlands on May 3 and Aberdeen Beach Ballroom on May 4, but nevertheless, as with everything they do, they will be striving to ensure the shows are anything but mundane.

“On stage, we do like to dress up and make a show of it,” said John. “We have got our reasons for doing everything we do. I don’t think we’ll ever decide just to go on in T-shirt and jeans. That would be a bit too ordinary.”

That’s a concept they have always tried to avoid in everything they take on. The new album is another success on that score. Much more heroes than zeroes, this lot.

lAssessment is out on Monday, Heroes To Zeroes is released on April 26, both on the Regal label.