The Sea Beggars: “Beg To Differ”

DNRC095 | LP | 2022 | DELETED

Although they should have stuck with Citing Irreconcilable Musical Differences as the title for their debut LP, action-figurine group The Sea Beggars (a distant relation to The Sea Pigeons) broke up anyway in late 2022, but not before recording this blistering riposte to those who had any doubts about their by then almost-legendary chops.

The impact of this album was apparently so great that it lead one armchair critic to mutter something along the lines of “when The Sea Beggars beg to differ, it’s probably best to pay attention”. And in that respect, at least, Clint Bo Dean was probably right, for the first time in his life. But in every other respect, no one in their right mind should ever want to get caught out listening to this hastily cobbled-together stream of happy horsedung alone.

The band’s premise is basic: one of the seventeen guitarists (it doesn’t matter which, but probably Jonny Fringe) plays a simple riff, which is immediately ‘differed with’ by the next guitarist, and so on until you can’t actually hear anything at all. Then you realise the first song’s over, and there’s still sixteen to go. When album highlight (though still completely pathetic) ‘Chimes’ does what it does best – chiming in – the band goes ballistic, tearing through a mathrock conventions medley, arriving numb and lifeless on the other side of U2.

Think Coldsore without the stadium antics. Still, this is not enough to warrant the inclusion of some of the noodling collective numbers offered as a so-called ‘bonus package’ to this disc, including still images of magna-doodles created by the band while high on nutmeg in a gingerbread factory.

In hindsight, it really is best to just let the words and the music not speak for themselves; yes, to instead speak over the music and sounds and lyrics contained on this disc, to engage in a loud and heated conversation with someone – anyone! – just so you can drown out the inescapable fact, being repeated again and again throughout DNRC history, that it’s always best to count your chickens before they’ve hatched, and not to wait until after the album has been (inadvertently, we’re told) deleted from the annuals of sad and deleted annual things.

The Sea Beggars, had they ever arrived, would have begged you, just to beg to differ.