Sunny Rockers Sound Muddy
By Kate Brokaw
A&F Associate

Promoting a new album of surprisingly gloomy resplendence, lush pop rockers Beulah played for two hours at the Troubadour last Friday , a fan-friendly set that was also notable for its unfortunately muddy sound quality. The darker selections from the new Yoko were able to hold up in this live setting, but the carefully orchestrated individual parts of many other songs were all too often lost in a wall of sound, a glaring change from the the rich, crystal-clear production of the band’s records.

Yoko, released last month on Velocette, is a markedly melancholic departure for a band known for its sun-soaked harmonies. The six-piece San Francisco-based group, who made their debut in 1997 with the low-fi Elephant 6-released Handsome Western States, quickly gained critical acclaim after bringing 18 additional musicians into the studio with them for the recording of their 1999 indie-pop near-masterpiece When Your Heartstrings Break. On that album, as well as on 2001’s even grander The Coast Is Never Clear, Beulah established their mastery of elaborately orchestrated, wistful pop. With abundant strings and horns in the background, it was the perfect soundtrack to a sunny California day. Miles Kurosky’s lyrics spoke of “sweet sweet dreams and colors and sound/highways and the far way to be found,” while still acknowledging that “the Wild West is a slow pan/and the sunshine is fake/and the ocean is just painted/on a backdrop downtown.”

In the two years since, during the long-extended recording of Yoko, nearly all of Beulah’s members reportedly went through divorces or messy breakups; the result is the band’s darkest, arguably most ambitious effort to date. Eschewing any sunny, shimmering hooks, Yoko instead takes a cue from the elegant and expansive heartbreak of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The production here is just as stunning as on The Coast Is Never Clear, but it is more centered around melancholic, guitar-focused soundscapes, and more prone to textural variation.

And while Beulah has always tended to match oblique lyrics with infectiously poppy hooks (“everybody drowns/sad and lonely,” goes the refrain to one of The Coast Is Never Clear’s most gloriously upbeat tracks, “Gene Autry”), here the band pairs tales of romantic desparation with equally despondent, gorgeously sad melodies. On “Don’t Forget to Breathe,” Kurosky admits that “in my dreams, I’m dying,” as guitars and a plaintive trumpet build to a soaring, piano-laced question of “Is it worth me trying?” The louder “Your Mother Loves You Son” erupts into guitars, and a warning that “you’d better hope the world don’t end tonight.”

Kicking off the band’s first tour in over a year, the Troubadour show touched upon all four of their records, with a setlist that was partially determined by online voting. The band’s dense, powerful live sound was befitting to the majestic gloominess of Yoko; Kurosky admitted he’d “got the biggest heart you’ve ever torn apart” during “Fooled With the Wrong Guy,” with soft keyboards filling in any free space between the guitars. “My Side of the City,” a jagged, Spoon-esque rocker, had a live energy that was driven by Danny Sullivan’s propulsive drumming. And the cathartic “Me and Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore,” played during the encore after a constant barrage of audience requests for the Yoko centerpiece, proved to be the unarguable highlight of the set.

But the pretty pop hooks of older albums suffered from the overwhelmingly heavy live sound. At different points throughout the set, lyrics were barely audible, and it was often difficult for any additional instrumentation to break through the guitars and drums. The big trumpet solo in “Gene Autry” was greeted with a rapturous round of applause, but it was near-impossible to hear the instrument amidst what just sounded like a wall of noise. (Later in the set, the delicate surf-pop of “When Your Suntan Fades” was quiet enough to finally let the trumpet through.)

But it was during the should’ve-been-glorious, one-two punch of “A Good Man Is Easy to Kill” and “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart,” that the truly poor balance of sound was most apparent, as the mix became seriously distracting and the intended sunniness of the songs seemed a distant memory. Although too-low vocals seem to be a repetitive problem at the Troubadour, it was hard to determine how much the venue itself was to blame for the bad sound mixing of this six-piece crew (a friend who changed locations in the club mid-show reported that the sound difference was noticeable).

“I sold my soul for rock and roll,” Kurosky sang as the night grew later, and despite all the technical difficulties, it would have been hard for the sold-out, adoring audience to disagree: like most Beulah fans, they’d all fallen in love long before the evening began.