2001 // Beulah, The Coast is Never Clear // “A Good Man Is Easy To Kill”
Reviews: Pitchfork / Stylus / Rolling Stone / Splendid / Onion AV Club
There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t wish that Beulah hadn’t broken up; that they’d not been so emotionally and physically injured so as to call it quits in 2004. Because if anyone deserved to have the success that bands like Camera Obscura and Spoon have achieved in recent years, it was Beulah.
I just spent about thirty minutes looking for my copy of their 1999 album, the “lost classic” When Your Heartstrings Break. I either lost it, or never owned it to begin with (and was possibly borrowing some else’s copy for years), which is actually okay for the purposes of this exercise.
Though Heartstrings certainly is a great album, I have a greater attachment to The Coast Is Never Clear, a record which had the great misfortune of being released on September 11, 2001. It was also supposed to be the band’s major-ish label debut — on Capricorn Records, home to 311, Cake and Widespread Panic. However, during the album’s production process, the label sold its operations and back catalog to Zomba Label Group subsidiary Volcano Records. Not surprisingly, Volcano declined to buy up Beulah and a few of the more rough-and-tumble bands (Jucifer!) in Capricorn’s stable. Some former Capricorn staffers started Velocette Records to release those bands’ albums, so at least The Coast is Never Clear saw the light of day instead of never being released at all.
However, given its inauspicious release date and precarious label situation, the album never quite lived up to anyone’s expectations. Adding insult to injury, indie-snob reviewers familiar with the band’s previous material bemoaned the big-budget major-label glossiness of Coast, while simultaneously leveling charges of self-plagiarism, claiming the songs all sounded too similar to others on the band’s previous efforts. Reading those reviews now, some of which I’ve linked to above, that outrage is hilariously quaint and outmoded. Yes, the band had a rather cohesive and concrete sound, and were obviously in the process of refining that sound. Hardly something to fault them for.
The record actually received quite good reviews (outside of the requisite Pitchfork snark), and the band toured it to death — but at that point, the effort kind of seemed like trying to bail out the Titanic or something. Because, on top of all this other drama, Beulah were a mercurial and semi-troubled group of dudes to begin with, and by the time their next album Yoko was released in 2004, they’d pretty much already called it quits.
Interestingly, I have just discovered, thanks to the still-updated Beulah site, that outside of SXSW appearances, I saw every show Beulah ever played in Austin (and one in Dallas). I can safely say that they were one of the very first bands that I was completely in love with. I can’t quite pinpoint what it was exactly — the horns, the western swing guitars, the unexpected bass lines, the brushed drums, the tack piano, the Moog, the harmonies, the snarky smart lyrics, frontman Miles Kurosky’s charmingly weak vocal range — that won me over, but I fell hard.
And I’m pretty sure the knowledge that the band will absolutely never, ever get back together is another factor that makes Beulah’s four-album run so special. Because the last thing I’d ever want at this point is a Beulah reunion show — and I’m glad it won’t happen. There’s nothing like utter finality that makes the heart grow fonder.
ETA, 8 hours later: Did you see what I did here? I didn’t once try and describe what Beulah actually sounded like. I don’t know if I should be impressed with myself, or horrified.
