Posts tagged Beulah

The Light Footwork – Rapture Good, Rupture Bad

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3 years ago
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The Light Footwork

have been off my radar for a while now. It’s been a couple of years since their debut album, and with only one EP since, I’ve perhaps paid them less attention than I should have done. That changed suddenly upon watching the excellent documentary, A Good Band Is Easy To Kill. I’d completely forgotten that Jay, one half of the Light Footwork, toured with the Beulah as an intern, and it was something of a surprise to see him popping up every now again in the film.

While watching the film kicked off my love of Beulah once again, it also had me returning to that Light Footwork album. The good news is that it’s still as good as I recall, a lovely laid back record that wouldn’t feel out of place in the mid-90s. Which as we all know is when the best music was being made. With a bit of luck we’ll get a new album from them this year and all will be right in the world once more.

Beulah – If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart

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3 years ago
in
Beulah

A day late thanks to those useless cretins at Virgin Media, we have ’s wonderfully titled If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart. Taken from their 1999 (and now impossible to find) album When Your Heartstrings Break, I inevitably found the band far too late to do any good seeing as they were already in the process of breaking up when I caught on. The band started on Elephant 6 Records, something that is instantly recognisable from their sound. This song introduced the more “mid-fi” (as the band put it) sound of Beulah, adding in strings and horns to their originally rough sound. As for the song, is it a direct comment on their critics and fans? Or an analogy for love? Maybe both?

Beulah / Website / Myspace

Laziest. Post. Ever.

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5 years ago
in

So I’ve been pretty slack in posting here of late. This is because I’m simply not finding the time of late, between work giving me more hours (this is actually a good thing) and a ton of other things that I’ve currently got going on. For the indefinite future, posting will probably down to something like three or four posts a week or something. I’ll write when I get time and have something to share. Tonight though, we’ve got a pretty lazy post. There’s no stunning new music here, no tiny band you should be aware of. You probably know most of these bands and the songs. There’s no great agenda here. It’s just a bunch of great songs that for one reason or another have been getting a lot of play over the past week or so. I’d usually include a little write up explaining the use of each one, but I’m so tired right now that I’m struggling to stay awake to type this. I might add something further to it all tomorrow night or something.

MP3 – Halah (expired)
MP3 – Lua (expired)
MP3 – Sometimes (expired)
MP3 – Don’t Forget To Breathe (expired)
MP3 – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead (expired)
MP3 – A Better Son/Daughter (expired)
MP3 – London Still (expired)
MP3 – Coffee Shop Girl (expired)
MP3 – Romantic Rights (expired)

Oh, and go see Children of Men. It’s out now in the UK and comes out in the US on Christmas Day. I’ll even call it now as getting a Best Picture nomination once award season rolls around, even despite the Academy’s aversion to anything even mildly sci-fi. Simply the best film of this year so far by a mile. It’s intelligent, disturbing and beautiful all at the same time, and it deserves your attention.

Hooray for Sunday!

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5 years ago
in

And so our little week of days of the week theme posts comes to an end. Sunday isn’t the strongest day it seems, but there’s still a nice enough selection to work with. I think that monday was my favourite one of these for the nice variety that it had, but most of them have turned out pretty well. What has everyone else liked?

MP3 – Sunday Morning (expired) (from The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967)
Excellent dreamy pop that captures the whole “I’m wasting my life” feeling oh so perfectly. I don’t know if that’s what the song is supposed to be about, but it works well in that way for me anyway. I’ve never been a big Velvet Underground fan, mostly just giving ‘Loaded’ the occasional listen, but this is still rather good.

MP3 – Tell Me On A Sunday (expired) (from Hot Garden Stomp, 1994)
Apparently this is actually a cover of an Andrew Lloyd Webber song, but you’d never be able to tell just from listening to it. In the hands of John Darnielle it becomes an incredibly lo-fi, stripped down song. Which helps it a lot given it allows us to focus on the words, usually a staple of the Mountain Goats as it is. God knows how this compares to any other versions, but I can’t imagine anything else suiting this kind of song so well. It’s the kind of thing I think would be at home with actually. Guy knows girl is going to break up with him, does nothing to argue with this, just asks her to make it as painless as possible for him. In fact, with words like “I don’t want to fight night and day / it’s bad enough that you’re going / don’t leave in silence – no words at all / don’t get mad and slam the door / it’s no way to end this”, it just may be the least bitter break up song ever.

MP3 – Every Day Is Like Sunday (expired) (from Viva Hate, 1988)
Morrissey has apparently commented that no one really knows what this song is about. I’m not particularly inclined to try and argue with it. I do however know that it sounds far better than the average Morrissey song, who I really can’t stand on the most part. It comes across as a wonderful nostalgia trip, backed with some excellent strings, something that will usually improve just about any song. It doesn’t really matter that a meaning isn’t easily pulled from it when it sounds so good in the first place.

MP3 – Sunday (expired) (from A Thousand Leaves, 1998)
Another song where I don’t have a clue what it means, but boy does it sound good. An incredible use of bass, distortion that doesn’t go too far and beautiful lyrics over the top of all it. It doesn’t sound particularly like a sunday song, and I don’t think it has any direct relation to the day, but it’s an excellent piece of work nonetheless.

MP3 – Sunday Under Glass (expired) (from When Your Heartstrings Break, 1999)
Well we may as well end the week on a happy song, and this certainly fits the bit. One of my favourite Beulah songs from my favourite Beulah album (that I can’t seem to buy anywhere at price that isn’t grossly inflated.. suggestions?), it’s yet another song that has no clear meaning (what is it with sunday?). It may have something to do with the fakeness of modern life, or maybe something more literal about film, but I don’t really care that much. It just sounds too jangly and cheerful for me to be that bothered in analysing it too much. Oh how I miss Beulah.

That’s about it for our ‘Hooray for..’ series then. I hope you’ve enjoyed the songs as much as I enjoyed putting them together, and hopefully discovered something new along the way. I’m not sure how often I’ll do extended theme posts like this, as it has dominated the entire week when I’ve had a ton of other stuff that I’ve been waiting to write about, but I guess we’ll see what I feel like doing at the time. Your regular service of rambles about bands you’ve probably never heard of before will be resuming shortly.

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