Beulah Break Up
After eight years and four albums, San Francisco’s Beulah will hang it up following a free show in New York’s Battery Park on August 5th. The critically acclaimed indie rock band crafted immaculate, intricately arranged pop records on minimal budgets, and took extended breaks from day jobs to tour — factors that singer Miles Kurosky hinted were beginning to take their toll in an interview last summer.
“What I write about is not so much mortality,” Kurosky told Rolling Stone, “but the mortality of being in a band: How long can this last? Here I am in an indie rock band that’s done quite well and done a lot of things we never thought we would. We’ve played festivals, we’ve been on Conan O’Brien . . . but at the end of the day I wonder what I’ve done. All I got is some crow’s feet. What’s the fucking prize?”
The group’s final album, Yoko, was made over a span of time when three of six band members got divorced and Kurosky broke it off with a woman he had thought he was going to marry. A more sparse album than the two that preceded it, Kurosky considered it to be the apex of Beulah’s oeuvre.
“I’m really proud of the progress and evolution of this band,” Kurosky continued. “I’ve never seen a band change from album to album, one through four, this much. We don’t always need to resort to strings and bells and whistles and what-have-you. This record means more to me than the others. It feels like it’s the purest, most artistic record we’ve ever made.”
Yoko caught the attention of its namesake, Yoko Ono, who became a fan of the band. “Beulah are starting to do something on a different level,” she told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s very close to the kind of writing that was done in the Sixties. It’s good, and it’s coming back.”
Beulah tour dates:
6/11: Chicago, The Abbey
6/12: Chicago, The Abbey
6/13: Minneapolis, 400 Bar
6/15: Denver, Bluebird Theatre
6/26: San Francisco, Fillmore
8/5: New York, Battery Park