Miles Kurosky thought he quit music when Beulah broke up, but even years of surgery couldn’t keep him away
by Lance Conzett
Over the course of eight years, the San Francisco indie-pop band Beulah gradually climbed the ranks with a style of music that married densely layered pop harmonies with a kind of brutally melancholic honesty rarely heard in catchy pop songs. The band released four well-received records, toured Europe, played The Ryman (albeit as an opener for Cake) and won a battle of hearts and minds at the intersection of "indie cool" and "mainstream teendom" when their song "Popular Mechanics for Lovers" underscored the drama in an episode of The O.C. (It was a scene where Ryan acted aloof and mysterious, while Seth struggled with which model he should ply with his geeky affections, if that narrows it down.)
But despite managing to find a degree of success outside of Pitchfork's delicate indie-rock ecosystem, Beulah split in 2004, and as far as singer Miles Kurosky was concerned, he was done with music for good: "When Beulah broke up, I had no intention of ever doing this again," he admits.
After the band's final tour, Kurosky underwent significant surgery on his shoulder, a procedure that was the answer to a decade of nagging, snowballing pain. The next two years of Kurosky's life would be taken up by surgeries, countless hours of physical therapy and — despite his initial misgivings about a future in music — songwriting.
Unable to lift his arm, Kurosky was forced to get creative when translating the music he was crafting in his head. He worked out several melodies a cappella, with former Beulah keyboardist Pat Abernathy reworking the notes into piano chords. Other songs found life on a guitar that was propped up so Kurosky could play the chords with his dangling arm. It wasn't until 2006 that he was able to start recording the album that had been coming together in bits and pieces since Beulah's end.
Then the recording itself turned into an ordeal: Around the same time of the surgeries, he had been diagnosed with an intestinal disease that affected his kidneys. With 70 percent of the album behind him, he was hospitalized again for kidney issues in 2007, which forced the remaining 30 percent to be recorded sporadically when time and health allowed.
"When you're in pain, you tend not to care," he said. "Music was the last thing on my mind a lot of the times. But I wanted to finish this record. I'd find moments in between when I wasn't in pain or in a bad mood or super high on Vicodin."
The result of nearly six years' worth of labor is The Desert of Shallow Effects, finally released on Mar. 9. In many ways, it isn't far from what a fifth Beulah album might have been, though Kurosky's songwriting takes a more narrative turn, moving away from the poetic vignettes that could be found on The Coast Is Never Clear and Yoko. "I purposefully try to challenge myself on every record to not be the same person," Kurosky says. As a result, each Beulah record is a different creature: lo-fi living room rock (Handsome Western States); mid-fi elaborations on a theme (When Your Heartstrings Break); summertime sunshine pop with a bit of darkness (The Coast Is Never Clear); somber folk-rock farewell (Yoko). Desert of Shallow Effects feels like a culmination of those sounds, under the umbrella of an appreciation for complexity in pop music.
"I wish I had more instruments [on Desert]. I want to write a rock symphony. I want an indie-rock version of Duke Ellington or Sun Ra or Captain Beefheart. That intrigues me."
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