BEULAH: WHEN YOUR HEARTSTRINGS BREAK (1999)
1) Score From Augusta; 2)
Sunday Under Glass; 3) Matter Vs. Space; 4) Emma Blowgun's Last Stand; 5) Calm
Go The Wild Seas; 6) Ballad Of The Lonely Argonaut; 7) Comrade's Twenty-Sixth;
8) The Aristocratic Swells; 9) Silverado Days; 10) Warmer; 11) If We Can Land A
Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart.
The worst thing about this album is its title. Or,
wait, maybe the best thing about this
album is its title — depending on your brain's first reaction to it. If it
strains you into expecting a sensitive, sentimental, depressed, or melancholic
set of songs (under the «cure your own heartbreak with our own heartbreak» principle), you will be sorely disappointed. But
if it is «when your heartstrings break... try something light and uplifting,
like our second album», then that's a different matter. On the other hand, it
is still a little difficult to see what exactly this kind of music has to do
with «heartstrings» in any sort of traditional understanding.
Glancing at the song titles, you might suspect
that Beulah are growing up, and trying to shed at least a little bit of that
show-off-ey indie kid aesthetics where it is much more important to put
yourself and your music on a different plane of existence than to write good
songs. The music, meanwhile, has been aggrandized, with 18 different session
musicians used in the recording process and Bill Evans on keyboards added to
the band's «stable» lineup. Nobody, least of all the band leaders themselves,
would dream of wasting all that pool of talent on an ordinary «gimmicky»
record, right? But then the question is: what
sort of record is this, then?
My best guess is that both here and on
subsequent trys, Beulah's ambition was to create their own version of SMiLE for the raging Nineties. The
whimsical attitude, where spiritual yearning and grand emotional tugs peep out
every now and then from superficially «fluffy» musical structures, they already
had, as well as an absurdist lyrical streak and an experimental mindset. All
that was left was to broaden their technical base — and by bringing in all
those extra players with their instruments, they were free to try out a more
symphonic approach. There'd be as much ambition as on a Radiohead record, only
it would be sunny, poppy, and a tad silly. And if they got too tired of
emulating the Beach Boys, they could always go back to emulating the Kinks.
In fact, melody-wise, the rhythmic skeletons of
these songs are consistently closer to the Kinks than to the baroque
fluctuations of Brian Wilson — but the overall atmosphere of romantic absurdity
is not something that Ray Davies, who'd always refused to get his head too high
up in the clouds, would have appreciated. And it lays open the possibilities
for a fruitful, exciting synthesis, which works so well, technically, that with
this album, Beulah ensured some serious popularity with seasoned fans of everything
Sixties-related (particularly those people who, you know, thought that music
died circa 1969, and that it took The Dukes of Stratosphear to revive it).
Like most of these projects, though (and I am not excluding XTC, either), synthesizing
various strains of the Sixties in the Nineties still has that smarmy
post-modernist ring to it, and ends up being more of a quirky tribute than an
album showing off an autonomous and mind-blowing artistic vision. The problem
is always the same: Kurosky and Swan are so intent on making music «in the same
vein as» their idols that they forget to concentrate on the essentials of
proper pop songwriting. Something like ʽScore From Augustaʼ has a cool retro
sound to it, with a tasteful and energetic mix of live instruments and vocal
harmonies, but the whole mix seems to be galloping forward on one note, and
the most melodically inventive thing about the song is Swan's trumpet part —
which is really very simple, but catchy, but repetitive, but memorable, but
could be seriously annoying, should your brain suggest that this mariachi-like style
of trumpet playing is incompatible with Sixties retro-pop.
Then ʽSunday Under Glassʼ, all awash in brass,
flute, and string overdubs, comes along to drag you away into a psychedelic
paradise to the sounds of a nasal vocal melody which somehow reminds me of Mike
Love. It is a song that has everything... except for a decent hook, that is. Too
much of everything, in fact, quickly floating before your eyes and ears like a
multi-colored cloud whose various hues are too dazzling for the senses to leave
a lasting impression. Actually, it's one of those songs where there seems to be
too much and too little going on at
the same time — too much in terms of various overdubs, too little in terms of
actual melodic dynamics.
That said, the band seems to fare significantly
better, «heartstrings-wise», when they try to evoke tender sentiments rather
than tickle our fancies with psycho colors. Already ʽCalm Go The Wild Seasʼ has
a properly baroque aura to it, one of sincere gallantry and delicacy; but the
album's emotional peak is reached on ʽSilverado Daysʼ, whose mercilessly
encoded lyrics seemingly invoke a nostalgic feel ("I was a kid and you
were my hero..."), finely matched with the piano ballad melody whose
chords remind of McCartney but whose vocals remind more of Lennon. In fact, I
think the album gets better as it progresses, reaching its humble peak of sorts
on the final numbers: ʽWarmerʼ shows signs of adorable whimsical tenderness,
and ʽIf You Can Land A Man On The Moon...ʼ is redeemed through its little baroque
piano passages which could just as well have been played on harpsichord for the
sake of extra authenticity.
As difficult as it is for me to «fall in love»
with an album like this — it makes too little sense for me to do that — I can
easily understand how others would, and also how such records prepared the
ground for the Beach Boys-inspired indie art-pop explosion of the 21st century
in a way that few other bands at the time were capable of. At any rate, the
only reason to give it a thumbs down would be active hatred for the band and
their «phony», «manneristic» attempts at recreating the form, but not the
spirit of pop music's greatest decade. But even if there is something stiff and artificial about the way they are doing it,
there is no need to doubt the purity and nobleness of the motive, or the
earnestness of the work effort that went into it. One thing that I lack most of
all, apart from the lack of hooks, is a more sharply pronounced sense of humor
— then I catch myself understanding that if you add hooks and humor to this
band, it will turn into Ween, and we already have ourselves a Ween. So just a
basic respectful thumbs up as it is would suffice.
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