Beulah, "If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart" (1999)

(listen)

I was briefly infatuated at about the turn of the century by Beulah, a San Francisco-based band that specialized in pop tunesmithery, swimming the waters of a nearly twee alt/indie sound. They had some kind of connection to Olivia Tremor Control and the Apples in Stereo and some others. I was drawn to this song in the first place for its silly, wordy title, which I found on a CMJ anthology. It's not surprising that more than a decade on this would find a place in the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which I loved, for those keeping score at home). For better or worse, I have found Beulah to be a bit of an acquired taste, reason for suspicion as always. When I hear this song again after a while my first reaction is surprise and concern at how unfocused and dithering and precious it seems, and then I wonder if I really like it after all. But listening more rewards the effort. If I persevere and make a habit of it I find all kinds of clever surprises and pleasing little musical/production stunts disclosing themselves as it insinuates itself. It roams at will through musical ambience, like the backgrounds of running scenes in cartoons, rotating rapidly from one to the next, picking up the tempo and building out the arrangement with tiny flourishes: sawing fiddle, wukka-wukka guitar, French horn, feints at power chords (it's guitar-driven after all), a rinky-dinky tinkly piano hamming it up, and that clarion vocal of Miles Kurosky, who sounds long steeped in all the white-boyish traditions from Paul McCartney to Pete Ham to Ira Kaplan. Suddenly it's the loveliest thing you ever heard.