Best Record of 2001 Day 58: The story of an unappreciated pop masterpiece and the demise of a great band that never got their due.
Cover art courtesy of Velocette Records
Good morning!
For the last guest post in Round 1, Matty C takes the wheel and shares his take on Beulah’s The Coast Is Never Clear.
If you ask him, Matt Carlson will likely answer that he’s “a musician.” That’s of course very true-I’ve been lucky enough to hear him play. But he’s also a writer, podcaster, hosts a radio show, runs a record label, and more. And that doesn’t even touch on the work he does here on the platform with What Am I Making. If you ask me, he’s someone who’s work you should check out- there’s something there for everyone.
The words—and work— below the jump are all his, and I’m beyond grateful he let me share this article with everyone! I think you’ll dig it. When you’re done here, please be sure to check out more of his work!
KA—
2001 was a pretty damned good year in music.
The charts were littered with a variety of styles from Radiohead, Jay Z, The Weezer, and more. There were breakout records from The Strokes, Aaliyah, The White Stripes and The Shins. Radiohead’s Amnesiac topped many best of lists for the year.
What Am I Making is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It was an exciting time of variety and energy. There was bandwidth for all of these records to coexist with one another in a vibrant ecosystem of diversity and experimentation.
Your local college station very liked played new songs from Low, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, Missy Elliott, Gorillaz and Muse. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Seeing this landscape for sounds getting attention in 2001 makes it all the more puzzling how a record as brilliant as Beulah’s The Coast Is Never Clear could be missed in its own time, and then simply forgotten.
Beulah first came to prominence in the indie rock boom of the mid to late-nineties. Formed in San Francisco, CA by Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan, the band forged a sound from the sun soaked harmonies of The Beach Boys, syrupy melodies and the voice of an unreliable narrator weaving us through the California twilight at the end of the century.
Robert Schneider of Apples In Stereo heard a cassette of some early demos and offered to master the band’s first album Handsome Western States, which was released in 1997.
The lo-fi affair was a nice debut effort, but was bolstered by Schneider’s connection to the Elephant 6 Collective, and the blossoming success of Elephant 6 label mates, Neutral Milk Hotel. The connection with Elephant 6 would stick for better or worse, despite the fact that Schneider mastering the album and a 7” single were band’s only affiliation with the legendary collective.
The follow up, a decidedly more mid-fi sounding effort, When Your Heartstrings Break arrived in 1999. In addition to better sonic quality, there was a leveling up in the songwriting and arrangements on this second record. Instead of a sophomore slump, Beulah seemed to be surging.
The opening strains of Hello Resolven set the scene of The Coast Is Never Clear in cinematic fashion. Sickly sweet strings and a ghostly ethereal bell ring out to the vocal refrain,
“Wake up the king/Wake up the queen/Everybody laugh, everybody sing/It’s over . . . it’s over.”
What follows is a Southern California sunshine record that feels as though it were ghost written by Raymond Chandler. Despite overt poppiness oozing from nearly every note and arrangement, The Coast Is Never Clear is the perfect example of what Tom Waits once called, “Beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”.
Perhaps the best example of this can be found in the chorus of album highlight, Gene Autry. The song is ostensibly the tale of a journey to the west coast in a quest for self discovery and renewal. What follows is a conclusion summed up by the hooky chorus, “The city spreads out, just like a cut vein/Everybody drowns sad and lonely, alright”.
We can change the scenery but we cannot change the core of ourselves by relocation alone. The echoes of loneliness and desperation are littered within the words of these songs, all while the grooves pour out easy to swallow melodies and harmony.
On A Good Man Is Easy To Kill, Kurosky sings,
And when they cut out your lung
You said we could all breathe easy
The hole swallowed your heart
When they drilled holes in your skull
And screwed that halo to your head
Did you think you could fly?
It’s hard to know if the song is about Kurosky’s own personal health struggles, of which he has had many, or if this the tale of a friend, a partner, or complete fiction. In the end, it’s a song of survival and refusal to go quietly into that good night. Something Beulah is also struggling to do. Maybe the band itself is the hole in the heart.
The song title is of course a nod to the great southern gothic master Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Much like O’Connor, lyricist Kurosky takes a normal form, and turns it on its head.
For O’Connor the form was the short story. For Beulah, it’s a sunny pop song inflected with a stark honesty and darkness that is both jarring and easy to overlook. It’s a crafty way to deliver a brilliant and multileveled work. It’s also easy to miss just how brilliant it actually is.
After some label mergers, and various corporate machinations, Velocette Records released The Coast Is Never Clear in America on the auspicious date of September 11, 2001.
It’s unlikely that the unfortunate timing of the album’s release led to its under—appreciated status, but it cannot have helped. It was also lost in a sea of great records by bands with more momentum and greater resources than Beulah.
While this record holds its own against great albums of the era like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, The Soft Bulletin and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, this was a band without the necessary foundation in place and the proper amount of luck and resources to get their just desserts.
The film A Good Band Is Easy To Kill is an unflinching, but fascinating look at the final tour for Beulah. The tour takes place in the wake of the band releasing their fourth and final album, Yoko. It’s a make or break moment for Kurosky, Swan and co.
Spoiler alert: They don’t make it.
It’s a great look at a very good band making terrific records and still not being able to make it work. And this was in a time when it was far easier to make it as an independent musician than it is a quarter century later.
Kurosky went gone on to release an excellent solo record called The Desert of Shallow Effects in 2010, but Beulah has remained dormant since 2004. There has been recent talk of a follow up to that record on varying social media accounts, but nothing has surfaced as yet.
As a songwriter and singer, I am in awe of The Coast Is Never Clear. It’s a masterwork of storytelling, soundscapes and songwriting. It’s a record I wish I had been a part of. My band The Stick Arounds even recorded a version of Gene Autry and we play it often at our live shows.
They say that “if you build it, they will come”. Beulah is living proof that they might not, but it’s worth building it anyway.
Cheers,
Matty C
Thank you again to Matty for today’s post! Please be sure to check out more of his work over at What Am I Making! Any thoughts on this record? Agree/disagree with his take? Sound off in the comments!
Check out the full bracket here.
Info on the tourney, voting, and more is here.
Kevin Sent 