Singer-songwriter Christian Beach, a longtime fixture of the New Jersey music scene, released “Missing Link” as the third single off his recently released album, Basement Noise. The video was shot at the Abbott Marshlands at Roebling Memorial Park just outside Trenton in Hamilton Township (Mercer County, NJ).
Featured prominently are the remains of the grand staircase that, in the early 1900s, was used to connect people with the location’s Spring Lake and a long-gone trolley station and amusement park on the bluffs overlooking the lake. It represents a physical and literal missing link to a bygone era.
“The song began as an experiment in lyric writing for me,” said Beach. “I was reading an article in a songwriting magazine about breaking down various rhyming schemes in a way that causes tension in the listener, so that’s really how ‘Missing Link’ came about.”
Basement Noise, a collection of previously unreleased material, is available now via Beach’s Bandcamp site and distributed to streaming and download services, such as iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and GooglePlay, through DistroKid.
Christian Beach has been part of the Tri-State-area music scene since the late 1980s. As the driving force behind several bands (Slave of Id, Artists That Kill, Ton of Bricks) from the early 1990s through early 2000s, he played some of New Jersey’s legendary clubs like the Green Parrot, The Stone Pony, The Brighton Bar, and The Fast Lane. In 2005, Beach spent time playing keyboards and guitar for Michael Ferentino’s (Love In Reverse, Dog) band Transfusion M, appearing on its lone 2005 album and accompanying the group for a leg of the 2006 Vans Warped Tour. Upon his return from the road, Beach branched out on his own as a singer-songwriter inspired by American roots and folk music, and heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, Hank Williams Sr., The Band, and more contemporary artists like Jeff Tweedy.
Beach’s first solo album, Christian Beach, was released in 2009. Music journalist Gary Wien ranked it as one of the top 100 albums by New Jersey artists between 2001 and 2010, with its lead track “Open Spaces” in the No. 77 slot among the top 100 songs by New Jersey artists in that same span. In 2020, Beach released a six-song EP, DoubleLife, which was followed by the release of Basement Noise, a collection of remixed, previously unreleased tracks released on January 1, 2021.
