Beulah
When Your Heartstrings Break
»
Beulah
When Your Heartstrings Break
Sugar Free, 1999
RiYL: Elf Power, Gerbils, Beach Boys |
The last song on Beulah's When Your Heartstrings Break is a pop song beyond reproach. "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart" is an almost critic-proof song. The tune is multi-layered, evades traditional verse-chrorus structure, and yet still manages to be so vigorously catchy that it may require surgery to get its central hook out of your brain. Wow. Accolades all around. Thank you, Beulah.
After a song of such perfection, the rest of the album is merely bonus tracks. And there are some good ones -- the slowly-building "Emma Blowgun's Last Stand" and the horn-tastic "Score From Augusta" are two of them. The major criticism that can be levied against When Your Heartstring Break is that none of the tunes even approach capturing the exuberance of "Moon" or the band's fantastic live shows.
It's true that the band uses a lot of nonstandard instrumentation on this record -- tablas, strings, and lots and lots of horns -- but their live shows also employ as many as nine players and still manage to toss plenty of rock in with the pop. After two records (the other is the noisier Handsome Western States, which features better songwriting than Heartstrings but unfortunately sounds as if it was recorded through a funnel), Beulah still haven't hit upon the right formula for their recordings. The encouraging thing is that both of these albums are still very, very good. Their third album ought to be a stunner.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.