“Dry the Rain” – The Beta Band
(Words/music: Robin Jones, John Maclean, Stephen Mason, available on The Three E.P.’s, Astralwerks 1998)

Every single time this song comes up in a shuffle playlist, I think of High Fidelity.  It will be virtually impossible to break that association, and even now I’m struggling to think of a semi-plausible event that would make me think of the film second.  This is the song that John Cusack deliberately puts on to sell records (specifically, “five copies of The Three E.P.’s” as he tells his coworker).  I’ve been patronizing record stores for more than half my life now, and I’ve always imagined this as a type of sales technique.  Thinking about my own experience as a record shopper – spending a fair amount of time in the store in any given trip, in the mood to find new music – record store patrons are willing consumers.  One of my favorite parts of my trip to the local record store was talking with the employees about records (or mining them for recommendations for finds from the used bin).  I would often ask about something playing in the store, and sometimes I would even buy it, but I never really thought of it as a sales technique.  Instead, I always considered it part of the shared music experience – “this is something I like and I want other people to experience it as well.”  This is what’s missing as a result of the vanishing record store – the internet makes everything infinitely more accessible, but the social aspect has changed.  Sure, there’s lots of opportunities to share music on the internet (this blog, for example), but it’s hard to replace that face-to-face interaction that comes when you set foot into the record store. I guess this is why I still seek out record stores.

In that context, “Dry the Rain” works as the perfect record store track.  It starts off slowly and unassuming, preferring to slide into the patron’s subconscious rather than immediately call attention to itself.  It kind of sounds like a castoff from Primal Scream’s Screamadelica album updated for the late 90s, as it starts as a sort of folk – electronic hybrid.  The guitars slide up and down, the melody goes around in a circle, the beat drops momentarily – all pleasant tricks, but nothing extraordinary on its own.  Around two minutes in, the drums get heavier and the rest of the track follows – the watery sounding percussion and quivering guitar lines give way to this more refined sound.  In a way, the song spent the first two minutes trying out a few different ideas, the middle two minutes establishing a solid foundation, and the final two minutes soaring into the stratosphere.  The song clicks when the horns, vocals, and that subtly melodic bass line lock in together and everything else falls into place – it even comes close to a sing-along moment in those final minutes.  It’s the kind of song that wins you over before you’ve even realized it’s on; by the time you’ve noticed it, you’re already bobbing your head along.

This is where High Fidelity cheats – it skips right to the best part of the song, removing the buildup and skipping the auditory foreplay.  Sure, allowing a six minute song to build just to preserve authenticity might not make narrative sense (although, in a movie where records are so important, it might), but couldn’t something happen in between the part when Cusack puts on the CD and the people start to groove to it?

More on The Beta Band: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm