LICE

Third Time At The Beach follows on from LICE’s critically acclaimed debut album, WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear (2021). The concept of Third Time At The Beach is expressed in three movements. The first (‘Unscrewed’, ‘White Tubes’, ‘Red Fibres’) presents a child who is presented with the world, hammered by the dominant culture, and who realises that he has come of age with blinkers on. The second (‘To The Basket’, ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’, ‘Scenes From The Desert’, ‘Mown In Circles’) is a disorientating, alien sequence: it re-evaluates fundamental concepts such as money, time, nation and language. In the third (‘Fatigued, Confused’, ‘Third Time At The Beach’, ‘The Dance’), the individual embraces these new ideas, gaining a better understanding of the world and more influence over the path they take.

Everything is constantly changing on Third Time At The Beach. The album shifts from lush piano balladry to crushing industrial music, and from swampy avant-garde compositions to triumphant rock. Using vocal manipulation and field recordings, as well as cutting studio recordings and personal demos, the band produces a spatially elastic collage effect. The album, like the ideas it contains, is a work in progress.

Lyrically, the album uses a scattershot style to present the experience of learning (or ‘unlearning’). The listener visits ancient civilisations, the industrial revolution, outer space and dinosaur land, meeting medieval farmers, silver miners, cavemen, Napoleon and Satan.

Commenting on the album, the band says: ‘This album is about trying to understand the world and everything in it: history, science and how we explain it all to ourselves. It’s a celebration of feeling confused or intimidated by the processes that shape our lives.