Icarus goes emo: The Beautiful Mistake melds Greek myth, punk

By Mike Prevatt

If only everyone who got in a car accident gained some life-affirming perspective shortly thereafter, the world might just be a better place. Southern California-based indie quartet the Beautiful Mistake was recently traveling from Salt Lake City to Colorado as part of a tour in support of its recently released sophomore album, This Is Who You Are, and decided to make it an all-night drive in its van. Upon hitting a patch of ice, the van's brand new trailer spun, slammed into the van a couple of times and then flipped over. Quite the experience for the barely four-year-old act.

"There have been things in the past that have definitely set us back, but nothing like this," says bassist Jon Berndtson. "There's always something with us. We always kid around about that. When those things happen, those are the things that make us stronger."

Between vehicular setbacks and personnel changes, there's little rock drama the Beautiful Mistake has left to endure outside of a heroin habit or a wardrobe malfunction. Most of their travails and triumphs have been symbolized both musically and lyrically in This Is Who You Are, based around the mythology of Icarus, a young prisoner seeking escape, only to fly too close to the sun and die.

"The album itself is supposed to be a concept album, interpreted in the sense that you can choose to be a good person or a bad person," says Berndtson. "[The] whole idea of Icarus that deals with fight and a struggle itself, doing a good thing or bad thing, building on something and going to the next level--that's in every song. For us, we wanted to take the most personal song and name the album after that, because we wanted to have it on a positive note. Like, this is the way we were, the choices we made, and we weren't going to let anyone get us down. It gives the album a positive tone."

The mythological foundation of This Is Who You Are is also rooted in the album's layered, archaic liner art, which Berndtson says was inspired by the album artwork of the Smashing Pumpkins' MACHINA/The Machines of God and Pearl Jam's Vitalogy. The imagery of a fallen Icarus and other classical figures doesn't do much to temper criticism that TBM lays on the spirituality too thick in its music.

"In a lot of ways, I read a lot of reviews of our band, and lyrically, we get written off as a band who writes things as strictly spiritual," says Berndtson. "Some of the album does deal with that, but it upsets me because it pigeonholes us into something. We're more deep than that. I think anything in life can relate to a spiritual aspect, but we don't start out to write three songs about spirituality and three about alcoholism."

Taking this into account, it's no surprise that the band's big influence is U2, which, as emo has unfurled, has become as influential to the new generation of musicians as the Cure and the Smiths. Just a few years ago, you couldn't get less cool than namechecking U2 as an inspiration. While This Is Who You Are recalls Failure, an experimental '90s underground rock fave, as well as the late `90s/early 2000s post-punk explosion, the wailing melodrama, measured energy and underdog optimism featured in songs like the title track can trace a lineage back to the Irish quartet.

Berndtson thinks he knows why. "I think not only for ourselves but other people--all these band people that have written these albums that sound the same--they finally mature and listen to different music," he says. "Every person will go back to old-school music. People are trying to grasp on to something."