BEULAH: YOKO (2003)
1) A Man Like Me; 2) Landslide
Baby; 3) You're Only King Once; 4) My Side Of The City; 5) Hovering; 6) Me And
Jesus Don't Talk Anymore; 7) Fooled With The Wrong Guy; 8) Your Mother Loves
You Son; 9) Don't Forget To Breathe; 10) Wipe Those Prints And Run.
Allegedly, Beulah openly threatened that if
their next record did not reach gold status, they would split up — quite a heavy
threat for a year in which the top-selling acts were 50 Cent, Linkin Park, Christina
Aguilera, and Beyoncé, to name a few. But most importantly, who in his right
mind would name an album Yoko if he
really wanted it to sell a significant amount of copies? Above everything else,
didn't they realize that most people probably thought that «Beulah» was the
name of the album, and that «Yoko»
was the artist? (Unless that was the plan all along, of course, but in that
case, why Yoko and not Lennon? Ain't no copyright on the word «Lennon»,
either).
More importantly, there ain't one single reason
in the world why Yoko should have
sold more than The Coast Is Clear in
the first place. The previous record, at least, was Beulah's diverse and sunny
masterpiece. Yoko, in comparison, is
gloomier, bitter-er, full of depressed, melancholic, sometimes near-suicidal
messages, endless references to broken hearts, losing sides, stars refusing
to shine, and all sorts of diagnostic lights indicating that Mike Kurosky is,
like, totally becoming a cheerless whiner, and is, in fact, all set to take
his musical cues from Pink Floyd now rather than the Beatles and the Beach
Boys. And he wants this to sell? In 2003? No fuckin' way. Not even a little.
Besides, despite this «refreshing» change of
face, the general Beulah problem remains the same: many, if not most, of these
songs still suffer from a lack of
solid hooks and fail to convey the desired effect. Basically, the record is
gloomy, but not that gloomy. The
first lines of ʽDon't Forget To Breatheʼ are delivered with a «tender sneer» that
reminds of Roger Waters (listen to Mike bouncing those "land-MINES hide in your LINES..." nasal bombs off the wall), but there is no burning
fire, no genuine intensity to that delivery, and the entire song, with all of
its carefully thought out overlays, is still painfully «lite». Nice, but
underworked and unconvincing — and the same predictably applies to everything
else.
If you take Beulah as «intellectual musical
theater», some of the compositions are still interesting to follow while they
are on — something like ʽMe And Jesus Don't Talk Anymoreʼ can probably serve as
the basis for an entire Ph.D. thesis as you pick out all the lyrical and
musical references and try to understand how it's all tied together. There's some
Tin Pan Alley, some New Orleans, some Nashville here, some odd mood swings
from anger to optimism to some sort of nonchalant acceptance of the fact that
"you're going nowhere", and then there's the song title that is not
referred to at all in the lyrics. A bizarre potboil.
But the very few songs that actually make a
lasting impression are those that, somehow, most likely, accidentally, capture
some nerve-tingling wisps — the world-weary banjo riff of ʽFooled With The
Wrong Guyʼ; the honestly catchy chorus of ʽYour Mother Loves You Sonʼ (the
"last night's a loaded gun..." bit); and, most importantly, the epic
finale of ʽWipe Those Prints And Runʼ, where they give it their all and manage
to generate some desperate stateliness in the face of all odds. These bits and
pieces seem to work all right. Yet that is what they are — bits and pieces. Not
a lot to feel good about when the first five songs do not register in my mind at all.
Given all these feelings and impressions, I
must admit that I do not lament over the passing of Beulah. «All form and no
substance» would be much too arrogant and unfounded a final judgement, but
while there can be no question about Beulah mastering and owning a certain kind
of «form», the «substance», most of the time, has eluded me — like so many of
these other nostalgizing bands, Beulah, to me, seem like they were so afraid
of being judged as «simplistic» that they hid their emotional side behind a
veil of metaphors, similes, understatements, deconstructions, and heavy overdubs.
A veil heavy enough to give you the right to doubt whether they did have an emotional side in the first
place. It is almost symbolic, then, that Yoko,
announcing the band's end, came out in September 2003 — approximately at the
same time that Arcade Fire were beginning the sessions for Funeral, an album next to which the entire «Elephant 6» scene would
look like a bunch of pathetic phonies. (Not really meant as an insult, of
course, just to stress how much I personally prefer «substance» over «form»;
and the lack of «substance» is one general characteristic that applies to any
of the Elephant 6 acts, Neutral Milk Hotel included).
Weren't The Olivia Tremor Control an Elephant 6 band? I'd say that they were pretty substantial, especially with Black Foliage/Animation Music.
ReplyDeleteLovely dig at Neutral Milk Hotel there, George! I honestly appreciate it when 'pathetic phonies' is not meant as an insult. For the record, I agree about lack of substance.
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