‘They keep reducing our reality so we will break down on command.  They keep reducing our reality so we will never understand.  They tell us that we’re weak and to stay afraid’ (Reduced Reality)

Mason City’s Why Bother? may not play live but they do put the time saved to great effect.  Beyond Step One is the band’s ninth album since their 2021 debut, all nine being released on Feel It.  As admirable as such productivity is, it would mean little if there was a diminishing creative return.  However, nothing could be further from the truth as Why Bother? continue to flex in intriguing new directions.

In many respects, Beyond Step One sees the band show increased restraint and more ambition in equal measure across its sixteen tracks.  The structural innovation manifests itself in the spoken word tracks that alternate throughout the album.  These fractured, bleakly poetic passages are intertwined with unsettling, noise infused electronica.  Each was composed and narrated by the band’s fifth member who is currently incarcerated in Anamosa State Prison, and they provoke a sense of eerie unease that has come to define the band’s most recent recordings.

These passages intersperse the band’s more classically constructed tracks.  Here, there is a real sense of a more stripped back simplicity being in play as the languidly drawled vocals tease out a quietly surreal social satire spanning agricultural pollution to a society willingly subsuming itself to AI.  Ragged, lo-fi garage punk remains at the heart of their sound and is laced with a distinctly off-kilter pop sensibility, a partnership perfectly embodied by the choppily languorous Farm Pollution and the hazy surge of The Final Ride

These tracks are largely shorn of the electronic leaning elements that we have come to expect.  Instead, these are confined to accompanying the spoken word interludes, a separation that serves to provide a crisp clarity between the two elements.  This is a distinction that is maintained throughout until the rousing Proceed, which draws everything together into a fevered climatic reverie.