Sound garden

Bettie Serveert arrange a mixed bouquet on Dust Bunnies

by Don Fluckinger

The guitar-pop quartet Bettie Serveert -- who play at the Iron Horse June 2 -- don't consider themselves trendy. Unlike their fellow European songsters the Cardigans, this Dutchband don't have a hit record. Unlike their fellow Matador label-mates Pavement, they don't have a 'tude that scores bonus points with the underground scene. They do, however, have in lead singer Carol van Dijk a frontwoman whose distinctive voice can be flirty, serious, whimsical, and sarcastic in turn.

Moreover, underground indie music fans have an excuse to pick up the group's latest album, Dust Bunnies, in the presence of producer Bryce Goggin, whose work with Pavement, Chavez, Come, Kim Deal, and John Zorn has garnered him a cult following much like Butch Vig's, after he ran the table with great albums from Nirvana, L7, and Sonic Youth.

Dust Bunnies sports shades of the Wedding Present in the punchy funk riff of "Pork & Beans," a 360s-like breakdown in the middle of "Misery Galore," Velvet Underground-like drones in "Sugar the Pill" and "Heaven," and what could be construed as a wailing indictment of the manufactured "alternative" rock scene in "Geek (Rich Dumb White Kid)" and "Rudder."

The album is a cacophonous pop soundscape that doesn't commit to one particular style -- yet it never strays too far from its discordant center. The choicest cut is "Story in a Nutshell," a joyous, minute-long romp through a first love affair. "We thought [`Story'] was a very catchy, jumpy song, but in a way we were really unable to extend it," says bassist Herman Bunskoeke. "It seems like all the ingredients or details were just done in 70 seconds. And if you were to put another chorus in it or another bridge or something, that just always sounded stupid. It's 70 seconds, and that should be it."

Bettie Serveert (Dutch for "Bettie Serves") are named after a television show starring the only female tennis pro from the Netherlands ever to make the Wimbledon quarterfinals. At the time the show was popular, Bunskoeke modeled nude for students at an Amsterdam art school, where he met guitarist Peter Visser. Together they formed De Artsen, a group who had built a sizable following by the late '80s. Van Dijk worked the soundboards for De Artsen for a year, and when van Dijk and a few of the musicians got together to make Christmas tapes after De Artsen broke up, Bettie Seervert were born.

The band's first album, 1992's Palomine, was a critical success; the considerably darker and raw follow-up, 1995's Lamprey, was an album not even a mother could love. Or in the case of Bettie Serveert, not even the guitarist: Visser told Rolling Stone that the band never listen to the album or play the songs. Van Dijk, at times, has indicated it's not among the group's best work.

"Lamprey was much better as Carol sometimes sees it," Bunskoeke says. "For Carol it was even more hectic because we also had to finish lyrics for some songs. . . . If I look back I can still see Carol in a corner somewhere with all paper stuff flying around her, and books, and staring at the ceiling to finish lyrics, and in the other room the three of us getting together to invent some new stuff. It's not a very healthy situation to make a second record."

If they learned anything from Lamprey it was that they couldn't compose in the studio; half of that album's songs were done that way. So when it came time to record Dust Bunnies, they had already written and rehearsed all but one of the 13 songs.

Then Goggin entered the scene, proving his mettle as an organizer, arranger, and sonic sculptor. He took over the band's music for a couple weeks in Bearsville Studios near Woodstock, New York and prepared the band to record their music over several days before the tape started rolling.

At the end of some sessions, they felt resentful about Goggin's toying with basslines, or the speed of rhythm guitar lines, or the drumming style. But people around the band immediately noticed the benefits of his tinkering.

"Certain songs came more together and just made more sense," Bunskoeke says. "Pre-production week, we had two shows. Our manager was there and people from the record company, and they could totally tell the difference. They came up after the shows to us, [saying], `We don't know what's changed because the songs are still the same, but it sounds so much more together and so much more better' than two weeks earlier."

After polishing those songs with even more road shows this year, Bettie Serveert's bus arrives in Northampton next Monday. Clubgoers will see how they're anything but retro, yet their adherence to basic pop tenets-- catchy hooks, quick chorus-and-verse constructions, and a lead vocalist strong enough to hold her own against some fierce competition from the guitars -- make them eminently trendy in this age of post-R.E.M. jangly pop.

Bettie Serveert play the Iron Horse, in Northampton, at 10 p.m. on June 2. Tickets are $10. Call (413) 584-0610.