Everything that made Future Me Hates Me special remains on The Beths’ wonderful second album. Jump Rose Gazers confirms the band have the humanity to be relatable, and they have a gift for creating songs that aim for the heart and stay in the head.
The Beths have managed to create another overwhelmingly thrilling record. One in stunning communion with their debut but also distinctly its own creature.
The Beths’ sophomore album, Jump Rope Gazers, does precisely what you want a second album to do: it lets the band sound older, wiser, and even more talented.
The Beths take another step forward on Jump Rope Gazers, a second album bursting with melodic and high-octane riffs.
No wheels were reinvented in the making of this record, but it travels straight to the heart nonetheless.
While there's an overall sense of reining in and refining on Jump Rope Gazers that keeps it from reaching the giddiest heights of its predecessor, the band sounds just as good in this mode as the other, just a little different.
Aside from continuing their streak of power pop gold, the harmonies on display (including Stokes’ multi-tracked ones) are ravishing.
The Beths find their most focused sound yet in the midst of uncertainty.
New Zealand power-poppers the Beths return with a sophomore album that makes even the most senior indie-rock acts feel rudimentary by comparison.
Filled with bouncy riffs, sweet harmonies, anxiety, and kindness, Jump Rope Gazers confirms that the Beths are good at slower, more reflective songs, too, though there's plenty of spark to carry listeners through.
The Auckland quartet effortlessly combine their trademark mix of fizzing melodies and crunching guitars underpinned with deft lyrics that evoke sunshine, self-doubt, euphoria, and heartbreak.
Jump Rope Glazers isn’t the flashiest thing you’ll hear these days but it’s strengths are copious and evident with every subsequent track featured within. It’s rare to find a band that is so low on pretence, high on sincerity and so wholly appealing.
With Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths ... prove that despite a global pandemic, it’s still possible to have a good time. They might not be excited, but we sure are.
The growth and maturity demonstrated on this album is indicative of just how special they are.
The songs on Jump Rope Gazers aren’t as immediately addictive as what came before, but The Beths’ natural intuition for emotive and melodic writing is still intact.
With Jump Rope Gazers, The Beths add new layers to the sound they began establishing two years ago, and those layers are as touching as they are revealing.
Every element of the album is so richly defined that these songs can’t help but pop.
Ultimately, it's an album rooted in the constant collision of rock and pop.
The irony of ‘Jump Rope Gazers’ is that as The Beths push themselves to do something different for album number two, they actually end up with the sonic sameness that the first record miraculously avoided.
It’s an album that Beths fans will doubtless like very much, and it offers a strong mission statement to the future that this is a band hungry to expand and determined to explore the hitherto untrodden ground.
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