Beulah - “Popular Mechanics for Lovers”

Let’s take another stab at this “critically indefensible” thing because, as Casey at Crumbler queried yesterday: what’s so bad about Beulah? And of course, the short answer is nothing at all. They were a perfectly competent pop band with periphery Elephant 6 associations, which is a very neat and convenient way to slot their head-boppy 60s vibe into the ripple effect of Music That Was Important a la Dusk at Cubist Castle. Like countless bands before and after them, they worked hard but eventually fizzled out amid a small following and meager cash flow. If you’ve ever been in a band, you know this is a better fate than 90% of all people who make music can aspire to.

Musically, however, I’m less inclined to be so forgiving and I think it’s because—for lack of a better term—the music itself is forgiving. I will try to explain what I mean by this without sounding like a stuck-up jerk (a dubious task, to be sure!). OK, so: can we all agree that, although there have been many different ‘shades’ or ‘incarnations’ of it, we seem to have this idea of pop music that comes from the 60s that never really goes away? It’s not just your Beatles and your Beach Boys, mind you, though those bands had a big hand in essentially making rock ‘n roll the new ‘pop’ early in that decade, which is a big part of where this comes from. But for whatever socio-historical reasons, I think we can say our culture continues to further the echoes of popular music(s) from that period. This is what Beulah did, in the most reductive sense, so there is also a sense that bands like Beulah—amiable guitar bands that go mostly nowhere—will never be in short supply (currently, it is the job of everyone who has ever been in Vivian Girls to perpetuate this, but they will be replaced soon). ‘The 60s,’ whatever the term actually means, never really go away or come back; they’re always just sort of around.

Now, no: I’m not saying that there is one sound that defines an era or that people interact with music based solely on its historical antecedents. That would be silly and boring. It pains me to put it in these terms—since, y’know, its art and you just gotta feel it, man—but in the economy of pop music, Beulah represent an excess supply to a mediocre demand. When The Coast is Never Clear came out in 2001, David Pecoraro wrote in Pitchfork, “I can’t help but think of a handful of bands that do this sort of thing just as well, if not better,” and the more I think about it, the more I think that statement doesn’t speak to Beulah’s stylistic particulars so much as their general existence as a strummy pop band. Again, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ (and several things great!) about what they did, but our perception of it as generic causes us to undervalue it when it comes to criticism. For better or worse, we lavish finer attention on things that feel rare and distinct.

My favorite parts of “Popular Mechanics for Lovers” are the subtle twists of humor. There’s the self-deprecating chorus / title, the filmic facade lines (“Did you forget to read the script?,” “I can edit those parts out”), and the Magnetic Fields nod that conflates songwriting and wooing in a more self-aware way than most. One occasionally gets the sense, though, that some of the verses and/or bridges were rushed to leave more room for the payoff hook. The song doesn’t really open up for the first minute and a half, after which you wonder why it was so important to cap it at three minutes in the first place. It’s a good song, but as I thought about it yesterday I couldn’t escape feeling that everything I’ve described in this paragraph wasn’t significant enough to warrant its own post. I needed a more ‘critical’ position to defend; and voila!: indefensibility was the answer.