Beulah: Yoko

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).

Beulah: The Coast Is Never Clear

BEULAH: THE COAST IS NEVER CLEAR (2001)

1) Hello Resolven; 2) A Good Man Is Easy To Kill; 3) What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?; 4) Gene Autry; 5) Silver Lining; 6) Popular Mechanics For Lovers; 7) Gravity's Bringing Us Down; 8) Hey Brother; 9) I'll Be Your Lampshade; 10) Cruel Minor Change; 11) Burned By The Sun; 12) Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out.

If this line of thinking applies to a band as intellectually twisted as Beulah at all, then this album should pro­bably count as their masterpiece. You can almost feel their brain cells writhe, sizzle, and burn up in flames, as they attempt to come up with «the perfect pop formula». Instrumenta­tion, production, hooks, moods, vocal modulations that reflect careful study of what there was before with a pinch of trying to look into what will come after — the Amazing Songwriting Labo­ratory of Dr. Kurosky at its functional peak, colored smoke rising out of the chimneys and bizarre fragrance smelled for miles around.

But the more they try, the more they baffle listeners such as myself (and I have also encountered the same reaction among quite a few music lovers on the Web). Every single song on The Coast sounds lovely, classy, and inspiring... while it's on. No sooner than the album is over, nothing remains in my brain — not a single goddamn note of it. And subsequent listens do not rectify the situation. This is their best album, clearly and expressly filled with pop hooks almost to the brim, but at the end of the day, they just skedaddle. Vamoose. Melt in the air like a mirage. Every single song on here has more «intelligence» and «depth» to it than ʽLucy In The Sky With Dia­mondsʼ, but Lucy is still here with us, and Beulah are not. What the hell?..

Let us take one single song and scrutinize it, to try and understand what's so wrong here. After the brief mood-setting intro, the first complete, self-sufficient, and technically impeccable number is ʽA Good Man Is Easy To Killʼ, whose lyrics deal with a car crash that involved Kurosky's father and prompted him to explore the proverbial father/son relationship in his art — so put this up as a plus (personal matter, adds to the song's level of sincerity and emotional involvement, etc.). The song begins with a loud, nasty fuzz riff, then expands with an agitated, Tull-style flute part and vocal harmonies, then calms down and slows down to the «baroque» verse section with strings, brass, and a pop vocal part straight out of the Beatles textbook. Short sparkling piano bridge to the chorus — a humble plea of "give up, give up your love / I promise it's not gonna kill ya" — and then back to the fuzz riff / flute / vocal harmony trio again. Repeat a couple of times, then cut to the fadeout where the brass and flutes get a little crazier and start threatening to punch each other out before the fadeout washes them all away.

Seems like a clever, sensible song, but something's just not fuckin' right about it. Maybe it is the disparity between the vocal and instrumental parts — the tenderness of the verse/chorus is in sharp conflict with the agitated nature of the fuzz riff bits, and the two give a «phoney» feel of being spliced for no particular reason whatsoever; there is no sense in the song fluctuating between these two states, nor does the music hint at any transition. Maybe it is the vocals — Kurosky cannot help it, of course, but his singing voice, devoid of solid range or any sort of in­dividual flavor, is bland, and does not do justice to the potential of the vocal melody. Or maybe it is the melody itself — take the fuzz riff, for instance, and try to compare it with a great fuzz riff, like ʽSatisfactionʼ, or, heck, ʽIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaʼ. Those ones had a bite and menace to them, but Beulah's riff just sounds thick and dumb to me. Same with the flute — if you are going to evoke Tull associations, why not learn more than just two different phrases on the instrument?

It would be all too simple to say that the song does not work properly just because Beulah are bad songwriters, but that would be wrong. Kurosky is a pretty good songwriter — his mistake is in that he is very far from a genius songwriter, yet he makes music that, want it or not, intrudes directly on the turf of at least half a dozen genius songwriters of the 1960s. Consequently, Beulah's masterpiece is their completion of the «triumph of form over substance» attitude — all the more ironic considering that the songs have their meanings, and reveal them to anybody who is willing to look for them. But there are meanings and meanings, and The Coast Is Clear, being full of «literal» meanings (as in, «ʽA Good Manʼ reflects the complex feelings that the author ex­perienced while his father was battling death...», etc.), has never once managed to hit me in my soft emotional spots — from which I conclude that it has no «musical» meaning, as such, as subjective as that harsh judgement may sound.

Still, due admiration must be expressed for all the doggone hard work that went into making the record so diverse and inventive. As long as I am writing this at the same time as the sweet sounds flow out from the speakers, ʽGene Autryʼ is a dang fine pop-rocker about the disparity between fantasy and reality (good hook — the pessimistic conclusion of "everybody drowns, sad and lonely alright" laid out on the listener in an optimistic manner); ʽPopular Mechanics For Loversʼ bops along with a clever mix of joyfulness and melancholia (and the "just because he loves you too / he would never take a bullet for you" bit might be the catchiest move on the album); ʽI'll Be Your Lampshadeʼ, whose title is probably a subtle reference to ʽI'll Be Your Mirrorʼ, mixes country and vaudeville in a very odd fashion; and they save their most ambitious and anthemic brass riffs for the album closer ʽNight Is The Day Turned Inside Outʼ to provide a suitably loud, mock-heroic, ride-out-in-the-sunset conclusion. It's all good.

But now the album is over, and... how did it go again? Damn, it's really irritating. No wonder, after all, that these guys were never able to find a mass market, or that retro-oriented art-pop in general stays so tightly glued to the indie community. Maybe it's just that the likeliest candidate to write the best Beatles song never written would probably be a person who's never listened to the Beatles in the first place. Or maybe it's all much simpler, and they should have found them­selves a better vocalist. In any case, I give the album one of those «intellectually-driven» thumbs up — for inventiveness, imagination, and hard labor. For everything else, please refer yourself to this band's many influences instead.

Beulah: When Your Heartstrings Break

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.

Beulah: Handsome Western States

BEULAH: HANDSOME WESTERN STATES (1998)

1) Maroon Bible; 2) Lay Low For The Letdown; 3) Disco: The Secretaries Blues; 4) The Rise And Fall Or Our Hero's Reward; 5) I Love John, She Loves Paul; 6) Slo-Mo For The Masses; 7) I've Been Broken (I've Been Fixed); 8) Queen Of The Populists; 9) Shotgun Dedication; 10) Rust With Me; 11) Delta; 12) Dig The Subatomic Holdout #2.

Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan worked together in an office in a San Francisco security firm. Then they decided that they would start a band, because they both loved music. Then they wrote some songs, caught the attention of Rob Schneider from The Apples In Stereo, and got signed to The Elephant 6. Then they released an EP, and then they released an LP. Sounds simple enough when you look at this sequence of events, but look how many things had to turn out right for it — the office. The partnership. The audacity. The Schneider interest. (The elbow grease?). From this heap of accidents and incidents rose Beulah and smote the world.

Well, actually, their first LP smote no one. In relation to what would come afterwards, it feels like their Please Please Me — a record full of «beginner's spirit»: lively, energetic, exuberant, but showing no particular depth of insight or breadth of coverage, and only the first signs of a bur­geoning songwriting talent. Of course, when the Beatles did it in 1963, it was only natural; when Beulah did it in the Nineties, a decade when artists were generally expected to blow the roof off with their first album, it threatened to put a «shallow» tag on them once and for all, no matter how many gimmicky titles they would assign to their songs.

The best thing about early Beulah is their sound, and even that is not all that unique — just a re­gular «Elephant 6» kind of sound, that is, sunny pop music with loud, but colorful, distorted gui­tars; vocal harmonies that owe it all to the Beach Boys; and a tight, upbeat rhythm section that keeps the band from going mushy. Well, The Apples In Stereo themselves sound that way, and many others, too. Maybe Beulah are a little more hard-rocking. Or maybe they position them­selves as a «wittier» counterpart of their protectors — with even crazier song titles and stuffier lyrics: the very first track already mentions Gideon's Bible, Ecclesiastes, astronauts on TV, and Jack the Ripper over the span of two verses and a bridge.

And they do come across as a bit too smart for their own good, because the songs have no clear purpose — yet they do not come across as dazzling musical enigmas, either. The means at the band's disposal are fairly well known and traditional, but it is not well understood what exactly do they use them for. Tenderness and romance emerge only occasionally (like on ʽDeltaʼ, which shifts from McCartney-like acoustic ballad mode to fiddle-driven roots-rock and back), but usually they just hide around the corner, as the band tends to sing about relationships from a more cyni­cal point of view.

A quintessential early Beulah song would be something like ʽI Love John, She Loves Paulʼ — the title uses the two-headed image of a long-gone pop band to illustrate why the singer is good and why his love interest is bad; the distorted, but still melodic rhythm guitar and the vocals, masked with some re­verb for extra hip-cool effect, suggest the usual nostalgic throwback to sunny, irre­verent 1966; the lyrics are full of smartypants references to various idols, some of which I get ("hey, oh, let's go" clearly invokes the Ramones, and the sneery, drawn-out "so long, so long" may be invoking the Pixies' ʽHere Comes Your Manʼ) and most of which I probably don't. No guitar solo, because guitar solos aren't cool for indie kids (who spend too much time soaking in their cultural legacy to learn how to play guitar anyway), but some moody army trumpet accom­paniment throughout from Bill Swan (who likes this instrument about as much as the late John Entwistle used to like the French horn, but seems to have spent even less time practising). If it weren't for the mild catchiness of the chorus and, most importantly, the band's sense of light humor and irony, I'd probably hate the song — and the album.

But this sense of light humor and irony, coupled with the tastefulness of the unprofessional arran­gements, is what makes Handsome Western States, in the end, so handsome. When the music is too slow, it tends to drag, but when they pick up a cheery tempo, as in ʽI've Been Brokenʼ or the album closer ʽDig The Subatomic Holdout #2ʼ, everything is forgiven, including the unintentio­nal toe-tapping and air guitar playing, simplistic as these rhythms and chords may be. In addition, one aspect they really paid serious attention to is the vocal harmonies — some are three-part, amounting to a lightly head-spinning psychedelic effect (ʽShotgun Dedicationʼ). So «unprofes­sional», in this understanding, does not necessarily mean «not hard-working».

Still, despite all of its positive qualities, I do not think the album is worth an active «thumbs up» — it is way too «manneristic» and emotionally empty, or, if you wish, «emotionally masked» (which, to me, is pretty much the same thing) for me to click with on a sensory level, and too de­rivative and half-baked to be admired from a technical point of view. Reasonably well made, sure, but definitely not one of those amazing debuts that immediately justifies the sponsor's trust in the sponsored. Let's just say that, at this point in time, they were still «finding themselves», with oc­casional glimpses of the findings to come.

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