Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Off Key Melodies [Explicit Lyrics]
Beside Themselves: Music for Two Harpsichords
Music: Strictly Drum & Bass [Import]
Buckwheat Zydeco Story: A 20 Year Party
Bloom Remix Album [Content/Copy-Protected CD] [Enhanced]
Best of the Original Fleetwood Mac
Building Nothing Out Of Something
Brownie Lives! Live At Basin Street And In Concert [Live]
Chopped and Screwed Texas Style [Explicit Lyrics]
Amazon.com
Although Beulah usually gets lumped in with Elephant Six outfits like Neutral Milk Hotel or fellow California smartasses such as Pavement, the San Francisco band’s fourth album is more like a cross between the tart pop of New Pornographers and the studio-tan ambition of Wilco. As with the band’s previous albums of low-fi pop, singer-guitarist Miles Kurosky’s melodies are reliably sweet, but there’s a stronger undertow of melancholy to the lyrics and the arrangements are sometimes rougher, lesser accommodating. The keyboards of Pats Abernathy and Noel play a particularly prominent role, and so does the trumpet of Bill Swan. Oh, there’s still plenty of guitar from Kursosky and Swan--angular and agitated when it isn’t sweet as a pedal steel in heaven. And, rare among indie-rock rhythm sections, bassist Eli Crews and drummer Danny Sullivan actually know how to find and ride some interesting grooves. Yoko may be not quite be the career-defining album that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was for Wilco, but it’s a major step forward for a band still restlessly defining its own sound. --Keith Moerer