Wipe those prints and run

I need a break from 'icebreakers' and tutorials on EMS systems I don't use and learned about last year. So let's have an omnibus Album of the Day.

Today's maestros are Beulah. Sometime in the late 90s I ended up listening to an awful lot of American indie, starting with Pavement, Mercury Rev or Grandaddy and branching off in all sorts of directions. What I like about these bands was their brightness and pop sass, mixed with  degree of surrealism and the sense that there were patches of weirdness all over that massive country.

Beulah were (are?) part of that quirky, interesting bunch. They managed four albums, The Coast is Never Clear, Handsome Western States, When Your Heartstrings Break and Yoko, of which When Your Heartstrings Break is my favourite, because it manages to meld melancholy with fizzy pop tunes. Yoko's brilliant but a lot darker - clearly the work of a band under stress.