Since forming at the start of the aughts, Washington, D.C. band Beauty Pill has made a unique identity for themselves by defying classification and following every new idea that suited them. Led by principle songwriter Chad Clark through times of activity and hiatus, the group has grown through various phases, often taking wildly different forms from one release to the next. The seeds of this uncontainable spirit are present on Blue Period, a retrospective that gathers the complete recordings made by the band between 2003 and 2005. This includes 2004 album The Unsustainable Lifestyle and companion EP You Are Right to Be Afraid (both originally released on Dischord) along with a variety of demos, outtakes, and alternate versions of material from the same period. The songs here are hard to place in time. Even though the angular melodies of tracks like "The Mule on the Plane" or the unexpected melodic twists of "I'm Just Gonna Close My Eyes for a Second" have some similarities to work being made at the time by peers like Blonde Redhead or Polvo, the idiosyncrasies of the songwriting are Beauty Pill's alone and don't fit neatly into any retrospective time capsule of early-2000s independent rock. The five tracks originally released on You Are Right to Be Afraid are more visceral, with cassette four-track production offering a rendering of the band's sound that's more raw and immediate. Some of this raw feeling spills over in the previously unreleased demos, like the take of The Unsustainable Lifestyle opener "Goodnight for Real," which is especially exciting, with Clark's vocals broadcasting mostly out of the left channel while the lo-fi instrumentation brings out the tension of the song. There's an especially experimental cover of Hendrix's "I Don't Live Today" and a highlight in previously unheard song "Fugue State Companion," a track with the same unpredictable twists and dynamic shifts between plainspoken verses and eruptive choruses that Beauty Pill excelled at during this stage of their ongoing development. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi