Beulah,
Of Montreal, The Ladybug Transistor
Satyricon 125 NW 6th Ave., 243-2380
10 pm Monday, May 3
$ 7
Sometime back in the early '90s, when Pavement expanded its
focus and Guided by Voices became bloated and redundant, indie-pop
music nearly died.
You could argue that too much irony swallowed its youthful
spirit, or that Nirvana and the explosion of grunge rendered
its tuneful, lo-fi aesthetic limp. Whatever the reason,
rock clubs started to see a lot less head bopping and a
lot more head banging.
For popsters who salivated for infectious melodies, giant
hooks and catchy, butt-shaking choruses, recovery emerged
in the form of the Elephant 6 collective--a conceptual,
incestuous music fraternity of musicians with similar aesthetics
who contribute to each other's work. Its members gave indie
pop mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by tapping the original
source--the shimmering, multi-layered textures of '60s pop
and psychedelia--and giving it a fresh spin.
Started by three childhood friends from Ruston, La., E6
sprang from small-town boredom. When the founders moved
to different cities, three bands emerged: Robert Schneider's
Apples in Stereo, Will Hart's Olivia Tremor Control and
Jeff Magnum's Neutral Milk Hotel. Elephant 6 then evolved
from a concept into both a bedroom record label and a production
outfit that occasionally released stuff.
The E6 collective has now expanded to include second-generation
outside bands like Beulah, Of Montreal, Elf Power and Portland's
the Minders. Its emergence is one of the most invigorating
developments in indie music this decade.
Of all the second-wave E6 members, San Francisco's Beulah
strikes the catchiest chord. Its most recent release, When
Your Heartstrings Break, is the aural equivalent of
Prozac: If it doesn't cure depression, see a doctor. The
quintet used 18 additional musicians playing several dozen
instruments (sitars, violins, cellos, trombones, trumpets)
and channeled the results into 35 minutes of multi-layered
pop bliss that draws comparisons to the Zombies, Revolver-era
Beatles, the harmonic structure of Pet Sounds, and
Love's Forever Changes. Singer Miles Kurosky delivers
lines like "All you need is a girl and a car/A country song
if you don't have the heart" and means it.
What makes this second release so impressive is the giant
leap forward from Beulah's debut, Handsome Western States.
While the band's debut record (the first LP released on
the Elephant 6 label) was mostly made up of guitar-obsessed
pop anthems with fist-in-the-air choruses à la early
Pavement and Superchunk, its latest suggests a conceptual
talent that's barely been tapped. It's virtually chorus-free,
yet along with the Apple's Tone Soul Evolution and
Olivia Tremor Control's Music from the Unrealized Film
Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle, it's one of the catchiest,
most accessible E6 recordings to date.
This kind of change is an essential part of band leader/lyricist/vocalist/guitarist
Kurosky's musical approach. "If you want to progress at
all, you have to do something different on each album so
it doesn't become boring to us and to whoever's listening
to it," he said recently in a phone conversation from his
San Francisco home. "Until the day I stop making music,
I don't want to ever make the same record."
Kurosky says the chances that Beulah would get any notice
would be slim if it continued churning out the same stuff.
"We couldn't have made the same record this time around,
really, because people would've dismissed us in a millisecond
if we had," he says. "I strongly believe in the Beatles'
ideology, where every record should be different and show
that you've changed a little bit. Look at 'Please, Please
Me' in '62 and then what they were doing just three years
later. If they continued to make 'Please, Please Me,' they
wouldn't have had an impact."
Beulah was one of the first groups outside the original
triumvirate to get signed to the E6 label. Kurosky formed
the group with multi-instrumentalist Bill Evans when the
two met while working temp jobs in a mail room in San Francisco's
financial district. They recorded their debut on 4- and
8-track cassette tape over 16 months. When a friend attended
an Apples show in New York, he gave a tape to Schneider,
who immediately signed Beulah and released the record. Kurosky
said he owned every E6 recording up until that point but
never thought he'd fall in with the collective. Now, as
the members of Beulah prepare for their first large tour,
they must find a way to capture their new sound on stage.
Kurosky doesn't seem too worried. "I don't think live shows
should always replicate records," he says. "If you want
to hear the record, slap it on, smoke some pot and grab
some headphones. The live shows have a bit more energy and
human contact. Our show is scaled down, but that's part
of the fun."
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 28,
1999
|
