“Cowards / we gotta unite,” Miles Kurosky sings to open “The World Won’t Last The Night.” The Desert of Shallow Effects is often a record cast in shadows, with the former Beulah frontman grappling with medical distress and existentialist panic — but one shouldn’t forget that Kurosky’s clever as hell, and the video for “The World Won’t Last The Night” lightens its very real darkness with Tron lasers and Carly Fiorina demon sheep. Two words: so awesome. Watch the Rawkblog world premiere above.
It’s a great day in Beulah-land. In a session recorded a few months back, Miles Kurosky was surprised by his former bandmates and the (temporarily) reunited act tried their hands at quartet of songs from his solo debut “The Desert of Shallow Effects.” Watch and download the session at The Bay Bridged, read my interview with Kurosky here, and don’t forget, Miles plays the Echo tonight.
Tonight at the Echo, Miles Kurosky will play a Los Angeles club show for the first time since headlining the Troubadour on October 3, 2003, as the frontman of Beulah, a performance captured in the documentary A Good Band is Easy To Kill. In the intervening years, Beulah broke up and Kurosky’s body broke down, with shoulder surgeries leaving guitar playing temporarily out of the question and an intestinal condition adding injury to, well, injury. Now, he’s back with an catchy new record, a crackerjack new band and a lot to say. I caught up with the musician during his week at SXSW last month after he kicked off the festival’s second day with a performance at Paste’s showcase at the Galaxy Room backyard.
David Greenwald:Your show at Amoeba Music in March was your first time on stage again in six years, is that right? Miles Kurosky: Yeah, it was interesting. It was fun, there were a lot of people so that was nice. I haven’t been on a stage in six years, I haven’t played a guitar really except for making little spurts of the record for six years. Today and yesterday were probably the first couple days that I felt sorta normal on stage.
It’s difficult – I don’t know how to explain it. Being away for a long time, when you’re away long enough, what happens is you start to think like, it’s easy to be away. I could easily drop out for another six years, 10 years, and it wouldn’t matter. Because in those six years, the last thing in the world I was was Miles from Beulah. Read the rest of this entry »
Miles Kurosky, thank God, remains incapable of writing a bad song and staggeringly capable of writing great ones. The former Beulah frontman spent the seven (!) years following Beulah’s 2003 swansong, Yoko, in and out of the hospital and slowly piecing together his solo debut, The Desert of Shallow Effects — a long wait, and one that couldn’t help but come with expectations. But Desert is a stellar record, as good and weird and unaffectedly catchy an indie-pop effort as the genre’s seen in recent years. Read the rest of this entry »
The Miles Kurosky Comeback Tour continues with this puppet-packed clip for The Desert of Shallow Effects jam “Dog in the Burning Building.” Beulahphiles can catch the singer at Amoeba Hollywood on March 11 and at the Echo on April 7, as well as at SXSW, where I will attempt to see him play 12 times or until I pass out.
With former Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky’s extremely rad solo debut and an accompanying tour imminent, now’s the time to catch up on his old gig. A Good Band Is Easy To Kill is a good, if not quite I Am Trying To Break Your Heart-level look at Beulah’s final tour and eventual split. The performances, including one at L.A.’s Troubadour, are excellent, but #kidstoday may be surprised to see what life was like for a touring band 10 years into a career on the eve of the Great Indie Rock Paradigm Shift Of 2004. (Buy it on Amazon)
Welcome to the first installment of Learn To Love — a new column where we introduce you to a band, year, genre, whatever. Up first: Beulah, a horn-assisted power-pop band with shades of Pavement, the Beach Boys and Big Star. While associated with Elephant Six, Beulah’s songs were more straightforward animals; the band peaked on 2001′s The Coast is Never Clear and broke up shortly after the darker, noisier Yoko. (Trivia: Michael Cera is a big fan, having used a tune in his Web series, Clark and Michael.) The film A Good Band Is Easy To Kill documents their final tour in 2003, and in the wake of BitTorrent, MySpace, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! and the surge of hipster culture, it also captures perhaps the last year when being an indie band meant doing things the old-fashioned way.
Beulah – “I Love John, She Loves Paul” (from Handsome Western States, 1997): mp3 Beulah – “If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart” (from When Your Heartstrings Break, 1999): mp3 Beulah – “What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?” (from The Coast Is Never Clear, 2001): mp3 Beulah – “My Side Of The City” (from Yoko, 2003): mp3 Beulah – “A Man Like Me” (from Yoko Demos, 2003): mp3
Radio sessions are the best. You get a quality recording and the band tends to do things acoustic and quieter. This particular session is not acoustic and quieter — in fact, it’s noisier than some of the album versions of some these tracks. This is great TheCoast is Never Clear-era material with Beulah in fine form. For the uninitiated: The Coast is Never Clear is one of the best pop records of this millennium, up there with Oh, Inverted World.
Beulah @ KCRW, 9.25.01
1. Program Intro:mp3
2. Battle Cry of the West:mp3
3. Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand:mp3
4. Night Is the Day Turned Inside Out:mp3
5. Interview:mp3
6. If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart:mp3
7. Popular Mechanics for Lovers:mp3
Bummed that on a list of a lot of only semi-obvious picks from artists with bigger, even better songs, Elliott Smith got stuck with “Needle in the Hay,” the song that most plays into the Elliott Smith Was Sad And Took Drugs And Sang About Himself Narrative, when, like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or his heroes in Big Star and the Beatles, his “confessionalism” was as much storytelling and character study as it ever was diary-page.
Despite “Miss Misery,” it is admittedly the song I think he’s best known for; it is a great and powerful song, but he was and remains so much more than that.
Also, this: “Posthumously parsing Elliott Smith songs— for foreshadowing, for anything— feels like something of a fool’s errand in 2010.”
I don’t know, Amanda, does that mean David Foster Wallace’s books have no meaning now? Or the poems of, like, Samuel Coleridge? What an awfully slippery slope to look for an angle on.
Also really glad “1979” charted so high, song rules, the Pumpkins rule(d), suck it, cred.
Miles Kurosky, thank God, remains incapable of writing a bad song and staggeringly capable of writing great ones. The former Beulah frontman spent the seven (!) years following Beulah’s 2003 swansong, Yoko, in and out of the hospital and slowly piecing together his solo debut, The Desert of Shallow Effects — a long wait, and one that couldn’t help but come with expectations. But Desert is a stellar record, as good and weird and unaffectedly catchy an indie-pop effort as the genre’s seen in recent years. 
