The Beta Band: The Three EPs (2LP, 2025 edition, 180g) [BECAUSE]

Why you'll love it

This 2025 edition is newly remastered and spread across a 2LP set on 180g vinyl. It gathers the Scottish band's first three EPs, Champion Versions, The Patty Patty Sound and Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos, including "Dry The Rain."

This edition

• 2LP set
• 180g vinyl
• 2025 remaster

About the album

Every record shop has a song it puts on when it wants to sell something, and in the film High Fidelity, John Cusack's shop owner picks "Dry The Rain," announces he's about to sell five copies of The Three EPs, and promptly does. We can confirm the technique still works.

Steve Mason, John Maclean, Robin Jones and Richard Greentree made these songs as a loose, playful collective, mixing folk guitars, hip hop beats, dub, samples and psychedelia into something that sounds homemade and enormous at once. "Dry The Rain" builds from a shuffle into a full-hearted singalong, "Inner Meet Me" and "Dogs Got A Bone" wander gloriously, and the long "Monolith" drifts off into the outer reaches. Chris Allison co-produced much of it with the band.

Collected on one album in 1998, the EPs laid the foundation for everything the band did next. Mason went on to a long solo career, but these are the songs people still ask for at the counter.

Also at Kops: more The Beta Band on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Because Music (cat# BEC5615818), a reissue of the 1998 compilation.