Beulah: Yoko

Over the course of its first three albums, San Francisco's Beulah made strides from sketchy kitchen-sink orchestrations to richly realized pop wonderments, with up to 18 instruments swirling about while deftly avoiding collision. It was a neat trick, but having proved it could be done, Beulah shed personnel and knit up its remaining collective brow in preparation for Yoko, new record which isolates the melancholy strain running under the band's past happy-sounding mini-symphonies. Lead singer-songwriter Miles Kurosky wallows a little, working with producer Roger Moutenot to redirect Beulah's brass hangings and string washes into moments of relief, rather than letting them define the mood. The result recalls an Americanized Delgados, or Camper Van Beethoven after it made the transition from happy college-rock to the grim Americana of 1989's masterful Key Lime Pie. Yoko isn't as good as Key Lime Pie, but its impetuous amalgam of bitter words, rough edges, and pretty interludes is, at the least, dramatic. The oddly built "Me And Jesus Don't Talk Anymore" typifies Yoko: It begins like a trippy Beatles track and develops into some kind of brutally jaunty, country-inflected show tune, with abandonment as its central theme. Elsewhere, "Hovering" plays like one of Stephen Malkmus' folky ballads, the pummeling critique of "My Side Of The City" (where "the weather's always shitty") fades into a mournful Dixieland stomp, and slashing strings and steel guitar poke gently at each other throughout the lightly weepy "You're Only King Once," in which a man forlornly and faux-nobly wishes his ex-lover the best. Yoko's sadness and anger can be excessively relentless at times–or, conversely, over-aestheticized–but Beulah strikes a strong balance frequently enough. The album's triumph is the dour, regretful "A Man Like Me," which lightens a self-pitying mood with lovely guitar shimmer and a few moments in which the melody swoops hopefully upward. If Kurosky can keep finding a way to ride the music like this, without bucking his gift for fluid arrangements or losing his sense of hurt, Beulah's new direction might lead somewhere really profound.