Beard Snax's latest album "semolina luv u" another worldly spin in "folk-punk"
Duo from Stoke-on-Trent, England on their new music that dropped on Bandcamp
By Chilltown Blues
A month ago, Beard Snax released their latest album on Bandcamp. “semolina luv u” is the duo’s eleventh release in just under a decade, and its mix that tangibly weaves folk and punk is catchy, witty, occasionally crass, and generally grounded with heart. The songs also emote a relatable sense of the world as experienced from the duo’s hometown, Stoke-on-Trent in England, where the personal mazes are, as they tend to be, informed in part by societal ills.
Beard Snax are friends Cai Brown, on mandolin, backing vocals, kazoo, and most of the chords and lyrics on “semolina luv u”; and Kez Kesic on guitar, leruad vocals, and chords and lyrics for 3a and 10.
They shared their thoughts with Chilltown Blues on the new album, their music, Stoke-on-Trent, and more.
Countercultural?
In an album full of interesting, well-crafted shorter songs, “Cancelled — gateway 2 glinner” and “vasectomy pls” feel elevated, in part, because Beard Snax is good at narratives and these are two of the longer songs. Both have elements that maybe feel a little more countercultural than they should, even given what “countercultural” as a term conjures presently.
“Cancelled — gateway 2 glinner references “Father Ted” co-creator Graham Linehan. Linehan was “permanently banned” from Twitter in 2020 “after repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation,” a then-Twitter spokesperson told CNN. According to a 2020 report from the Guardian, Linehan had recently replied to a post from the Women’s Institute wishing all the group’s transmembers a Happy Pride with “men aren’t women tho.”
Linehan got his account back in 2022 when Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. Linehan was cleared Nov. 25 last year of harassing a trans activist on social media (but not criminal damage of their phone in an encounter), with the Associated Press reporting that the U.K. district judge saying although Linehan’s social media posts were “deeply unpleasant, insulting and even unnecessary” they did not constitute harassment.
“We usually write songs separately and demo them to one another,” Cai said. “As it happened we both wrote songs involving Graham Linehan on the same day, so we stuck them together!”
For Kez, “‘Cancelled’ (the song) was the result of scrolling too much Facebook, and “watching people I grew up with turn from school bullies to essentially adult bullies,” he said.
“Adult bullies are smarter though, and they know how to hide behind irony and Netflix comedy specials,” Kez added. “And Glinner (the person) was a perfect encapsulation of that, being one of the idols of such ‘cancelled’ comedians, so it just made sense to join the songs together. A man once a lauded creator of British comedy who spends his days (on social media) fighting an imaginary battle against trans people. Can’t imagine a funnier fate.”
“‘Father Ted’ really was a big part of my life growing up,” Cai said. “I watched the boxset of DVDs on repeat religiously as a teenager. I wanted to be a comedy writer and remember writing about Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews in an essay about inspirational people for school. So it’s tragic to me that Linehan, the genuinely hilarious and insightful writer, has metamorphosed into Glinner, a monomaniacal rage-fuelled Twitter troll. I like plenty of work by people who I disagree with politically — ‘Ren and Stimpy’ springs to mind — but Glinner is so utterly absorbed by one monolithic worldview that it’s seeped into everything he does, turning his current comedy into humorless political rants ... It’s sad. Be angry when you need to be angry, but ranting 24/7 is no way to live your life. And that’s not a partisan issue, by the way. Obviously, our political rants are different, because we think they’re very funny.” (Visualize Cai winking here, he said.)
In that vein, “‘vasectomy pls’ isn’t really an argument against the status quo, it’s an argument against status quos in toto,” Cai said. “I have nothing against the bands Status Quo or Toto, incidentally.
“I often write from someone else’s perspective, and this one was based on a conversation with a friend who was trying, and failing, to get cleared for a vasectomy. I’ve never asked for one, so if you have strong opinions about vasectomies then please don’t come for me — assuming you still can. I’m more of a descriptive writer than a prescriptive one.”
The idea that people should have some choice over whether they have children may be a revolutionary concept in some circles, Cai said, but that’s what he thinks should be the case.
“As to whether you should personally have kids, that’s a difficult decision, and the song is ambivalent on it,” Cai said. “The song quotes ‘Where’s Your Head At?’ by Basement Jaxx, which itself samples ‘M. E.’ by Gary Numan, which we also sing a line of at the end of our song. I guess this represents the fact that you can’t really control what your offspring do or what they’ll eventually become. But Numan’s original ‘M. E.’ is also about being the last thing alive, slowly dying a lonely death. ‘We were so sure. We were so wrong.’ So it’s quite pretentious for a song about semen redirection, really.”
“the joy of fish” and k f c
“the joy of fish” sounds like XTC meets Pixies, with Kez’s vocals being a highlight for the ending refrains “Jag with her bags getting off at the station” and “prisons for everyone.”
The song “is a bit of a chimera, really,” Cai said. “The title is from my favorite story in the Zhuangzi — https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/LaoJuang/JoyOfFish.html — and the first section is an adaptation of a journal article by Fife-Cook and Franks called “Koi Seek Out Tactile Interaction with Humans: General Patterns and Individual Differences,” investigating individual personality in fish. Unfortunately, I wrote it from memory and so misrepresented Gingko as quite a sociable carp, but he was apparently rather reclusive. Sorry, Gingko! Then that little break waltz-time is a brief pastiche of ‘Point Me At The Sky’ by Pink Floyd, for some reason.”
So where does the “Jag” reference come from?
Cai used to live in Withington, Manchester, he said; “and (that) final section is about a local legend, Jagkanchana ‘Jag’ Singh … You can read a bit more about her, and hear a drum and bass tribute to her, at (this link) https://www.manchestersfinest.com/articles/guide-manchesters-greatest-characters,’ Cai explained. “Jag basically used to ride the 143 Bus all day, every day, with bags full of leaflets she’d written about (what she described as a) conspiracy involving the university sector either kidnapping or indoctrinating her son into some kind of cult. She was — and hopefully still is — also a very likeable and talkative character who is ironically well-loved by Oxford Roads’ student community. She is entirely different from ‘the Jags’ mentioned elsewhere on the album in ‘The Shape of Bigfoot,’ who are of course Partick Thistle F.C., Glasgow’s — and therefore the world’s — finest ‘soccer’ team. Oh yeah, and the ‘prisons for everyone’ bit is an apparently reassuring quote from the incumbent UK government, because God forbid we run out of cells to stuff petty criminals into.”
When it comes to “K F C,” the song that precedes “fish” and maybe evokes “snax” the most on this album, it paints a portrait of a “sacred” gathering at a perhaps not so sacred place. It’s inspired by Kez’s millennial-era attempt to fit in as a teen spending an afternoon loitering with a bunch of goth kids.
“Needless to say, I didn’t end up joining the goth subculture,” Kez said.
For his part in “K F C,” Cai said he just named a load of goth bands he likes and ripped the chords off of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
“I don’t know why we have so many fast food songs to be honest,” Cai said. “I’m vegan so I had to look up what the menu items are actually called at K F C! I guess food is just funny, I mean look at all those Weird Al songs: ‘Eat It,’ ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch,’ etc. Our band is named after my tendency to eat crumbs out of my beard, so clearly it’s something that we find amusing. You could take the bit about ‘Konformist Fascist Corporations, Killing F---ing Chickens’ at face value and I’d very much agree with the sentiment, but I really was just trying to come up with something ridiculous that an edgy teenage goth would say. Perhaps we should all be more in touch with the edgy teenage goth inside of us.”
Songwriting, folk-punk and underground hip-hop
With Cai’s and Kez’ friendship at the heart of Beard Snax, their songwriting begins with the duo separately trying to make each other laugh and making a demo of the results for each other, Cai said.
“Most of my songs just sort of appear fully formed based on random phrases I’ve picked up,” Cai said. “‘semolina luv u’ (the new album’s title track) is literally just a chant I heard some undergrads shouting at a picnic table. Then other times they start off as style-parodies. Believe it or not, ‘Class of 2026’ started life as a Devo parody and the original demo had me doing a bad Gerry Casale impression and everything. But Kez is a far more authentic person than I am and sings it in his own voice, transforming it into something a bit more original!”
This is “because when I sing badly in punk music, it’s a genre trope rather than just annoying,” Kez said. “Well, it is still annoying, but yeah.”
Although their Bandcamp bio refers to their music as folk-punk, Cai doesn’t see that label encompassing Beard Snax’s music in an exact way.
“The only ‘folk punk’ I listen to in the generic sense is AJJ, and they’ve not really been ‘folk punk’ since their album, ‘Knife Man,’” Cai said. “But I love bands that incorporate folk and punk elements in less taggable ways, like Pixies, Guided By Voices, early Hawkwind and Syd Barrett’s solo stuff. Rough, idiosyncratic music with strong acoustic elements, I guess. I listen to and make, under the name Tomistoma, a lot of prog rock and I bought my first mandolin as a teenager because I’d heard Steve Howe of Yes playing one. Unfortunately, I am not Steve Howe, so the music that came out sounded a lot less polished and more ‘punk.’ But yeah, I don’t really consider us to be ‘folk punk’, but I know that Kez does, so make up your own mind on that one! And hey, I’m sure that tagging it as ‘folk-punk’ helped you to come across our music, right?”
(It did.)
"AJJ specifically actually is what got us reconnected and over time we became this band,” Kez said. “Each of us simultaneously has similar and yet very different tastes, so I think that’s why we sound the way we do. I certainly fell hard into folk-punk, Pat the Bunny is the reason I learned guitar; but long before that, I grew up on underground hip hop and it took quite some time for me to actually broaden my tastes. I like all the classic folk-punk staples, but a special mention must go to HappyHappy (https://happyhappy.bandcamp.com) who just put a new album out — she knows how to really nail feelings in a way I wish I could.”
Reflecting on the reactions Beard Snax gets from most places they have played — varying “from bemusement to outright hostility” — Kez supposed they are countercultural to an extent.
“I feel like we balance each other out and that results in the sound we have,” Kez said. “I know I certainly have a tendency to tread the same ground in my writing at times if left to my own devices, so having that extra insight and fresh ideas that I could never in a million years come up with really helps to deepen our material in my opinion. Ultimately, we are friends before we are a band, and so I think that helps the music to feel and sound organic. Primarily, we don’t make and play music for any reason other than we enjoy it and think it’s fun. Though being paid is nice too of course!”
Stoke-on-Trent, aka “The Potteries”
Going through Beard Snax’s discography will make it immediately clear they’ve thought about the world as they navigate it — through lenses that include what one might call class-issues.
“Understanding class and its effect is important, but I think we need to be careful not to identify too strongly with it either,” Cai said. “It’s a pretty poor label, because at least in the UK it’s based as much on how you act and your interests as it is your income. I simultaneously got s--t at school for being on free school meals and for sounding too posh, so I’ve never really felt much connection to any class in particular. It becomes this performative thing which I have zero interest in. There are bands I won’t name that make their entire thing about being working-class, and it comes off as a caricature. I find basing your entire personality on how much money you have, or grew up with, a bit tedious, to be honest. Having said all of this, Kez probably sees this all very differently, and I think his ‘Under the Sea’ song (track 10 on ‘semolina luv u’) is a great example of his outlook.”
“Stoke is an interesting place,” Kez said. “A city that splits itself into ‘six towns’ that have varying levels of poverty sounds almost like something you would read in a dystopian science fiction book, yet that is the reality here. Think like the Midgar plate from Final Fantasy VII but with more cigarettes and drugs. There is a huge homelessness and drug problem in Stoke, though as someone who drinks far too much I am not one to judge.
“People are looked down on with great disgust as the lesser-thans, but with the way the UK has been for the past decade or so, I don’t believe that to be exclusive to Stoke,” Kez continued. “I think there’s certainly a level of resentment and bitterness in my writing that Stoke played a part in, I still have perpetual imposter syndrome despite objective successes, because Stoke is a place that likes to stagnate and put asterisks on your accomplishments. At the same time, I have little to compare it to, as I have rarely lived elsewhere for long. But any announcement of attempting to bring something new to the city or to fix something results in very little but derision, while people would rather romanticize things from two or three decades ago that are, in reality, never coming back.”
“Nothing you do is ever enough to earn the right to live even semi-comfortably in the eyes of some, and I think that’s just really f----g sad.” - Kez
Kez said he’s prone to distrusting those who prioritize wealth and status, having “grown weary of the national gaslighting of our generation that we haven’t earned what those before us did, when those before us objectively benefited from things we never will.
“Nothing you do is ever enough to earn the right to live even semi-comfortably in the eyes of some, and I think that’s just really f----g sad. I am perhaps too emotional at times when it comes to things like that, as I know things are not that simple, but I confess that it’s a trap I fall into quite easily. I don’t care how much somebody personally earns, I care whether they think someone is beneath them because of it, I suppose. Not if you’re a CEO though.”
Cai wrote a song about Stoke-on-Trent on the duo’s first album — https://beard-snax.bandcamp.com/track/s-o-t — and in the near-decade since very little has changed, he said.
What Cai further explained is also evocative of what Chilltown would be more like if it wasn’t so increasingly tied to the values of the major economic power (NYC) it’s close to. Though not an immediately well-known “rust-belt” U.S. city, Chilltown’s loss of factory jobs that coincided with white flight and two sociological catastrophes formed a wound. In between the new glossiness, worlds measured by rust-belt molded median incomes remain.
“The (Stoke-on-Trent) area is still known as ‘The Potteries,’ but the pottery industry here died out before we were born,” Cai said. “Globalization and automation made it cheaper to do elsewhere and nothing ever really took its place. There’s a statue opposite the university that says ‘A Man Can’t Fly’: I think that sums up the mentality here pretty well. There’s a lot of old disused industrial buildings around Stoke that are slowly being reclaimed by nature, with plants and flowers slowly crumbling away the brickwork. I’d like to think that we’re a bit like those weeds.”
Find Beard Snax on Instagram @beardsnax and their whole discography on Bandcamp here.
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