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Critically acclaimed singer/songwriter and former Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky released his debut solo album The Desert of Shallow Effects March 9 on Majordomo Records. He’s celebrating with a live set at Amoeba – and playing LIVE AT THE ECHO on April 7th.

“Shins and New Pornographers fans … might use this as an opportunity to explore another rewarding discography full of pretty melodies and arrangements that burst at the seams.” - Pitchfork
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For Miles Kurosky, former leader of indie rock heroes Beulah, the nearly six years since the demise of the San Francisco-based band have been the best and worst of times. The best: Miles married the woman he met during the final Beulah tour, wrote the most personal and sophisticated music of his career, and recorded his first-ever solo album, The Desert of Shallow Effects, to be released March 9 on Majordomo Records, an imprint of Shout! Factory. The not-so-good: Along the way Miles suffered from severe shoulder problems that made playing the guitar—and even lifting his arm—impossible and required two reconstructive surgeries. Then, just as he was recuperating, that horror was followed by kidney troubles that also required hospital time.  “When you're having a surgery every few months for a couple years, you don’t do anything, really,” says Miles, explaining the lengthy break between Beulah’s final release and his first solo. “You just kind of hang around. Your main thing is not being in pain.”

Painful as the hiatus may have been for the artist, fans of Kurosky’s previous work with Beulah finally have something to celebrate.  Although it took all of those years for Kurosky to regain his physical strength, he slowly but willfully managed to put together The Desert of Shallow Effects.  In some ways the album is a continuation from where Kurosky left off in his career, but at the same time it heralds a giant leap into the new and untried.  Produced by Kurosky and former Beulah member Eli Crews (Deerhoof, Why?), The Desert of Shallow Effects is a meticulously crafted, ambitious gem, utilizing a cast of more than two dozen musicians (among them several ex-Beulah members) playing a vast array of instruments. Its 10 tracks are rich and intricate, panoramic and cinematic, yet undeniably intimate and deeply revealing. Viewed as a unified entity they tell where Kurosky has been and where he is today, but they do so in a way that is never contrived or precious.

“I was originally going to write this epic that was going to start with my grandparents’ life and go into my life and draw a line about how I came to be,” says Kurosky about the album.  “Then I realized that that was nearly impossible and ludicrously grandiose, but I could take the main events that had the most significance.  I was going to do it in chronological order but when we think about our lives it’s never chronological. That gave me the liberty to write in a non-linear manner. 

“Most of it is about family and the past,” he adds, “and none of it is really looking forward. Some of it is about close relationships I’ve had with people and where I fit into the mix.” The opening track, “Notes From the Polish Underground,” is, on the surface, a tribute to Kurosky’s grandfather Paul, who spent World War II in the Polish Air Force. “He was separated from his family, trying to fight the Nazis in the Polish underground, and he’s supposed to be this accountant but he’s now a pilot and there are no planes. But it’s also about me,” Miles adds. “It’s about feeling impotent or helpless. That’s how I felt after the surgeries, not being able to use my arms or just do normal daily activities. He couldn’t do things he wanted to do and neither could I.”

The second track on The Desert of Shallow Effects, “An Apple for An Apple,” says Kurosky, is “basically the apple of science vs. the apple of religion, Newton vs. the Garden of Eden. I went through a lot of soul searching and I’m asking myself, what do I need more at this moment? Do I need science more than I need religion? I want to get well but mentally and spiritually I’m not well because my body is not well.”  Writing about this exceptional track, Pitchfork said, “What begins as childlike psych-folk, just sparkling acoustic-guitar arpeggios and Kurosky's internal rhymes, grows into a horns-boosted, strings-sweetened, fuzztone-chugging group sing-along…with crescendo after crescendo and martial drum rolls. The lyrics start with Monty Python before touching on religion, fond farewells, doubt, and falling in love with the invisible—including disease, which makes the narrator feel alive.”

“She Was My Dresden,” which Kurosky wrote about “how true love is equal to any obliteration, positively apocalyptic but beautifully devastating,” is another of the album’s highlights.  “Basically,” he says, “it’s the story of the love of my life going into a coma, and how I would react, wishing for her to just say my name one last time. In the end, I pull a Romeo and Juliet.”

“Housewives and Their Knives” is a noirish tune that on one level tells of a woman planning a getaway from a dreary domestic scene and on another speaks Kurosky’s relationship with

Los Angeles, where he was born and raised, and where he lived with his new wife for nearly two years before they relocated to Portland, Oregon. “Pink Lips, Black Lungs” is based on Miles’ experiences in the Catholic educational system.  “The song is about a priest who would have boys over to his rectory.  My experience was just a little friendly massage but I’d hear stories from other kids that the massage would lead to other things.  I wrote it from his point of view, with him trying to defend his actions.

“When I wrote lyrics before, for Beulah, they were of an esoteric nature, but this time, I wanted them to read like stories,” says Kurosky of the compositions that populate The Desert of Shallow Effects. The album’s title itself comes from a quote by the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright—it’s also about L.A. “It’s an easy statement to make about Los Angeles but it can also be made about one’s life when you’re counting up your life’s sum,” says Miles.  “You look back and you wonder, what does that all mean? And to a certain degree, if we think we’ve had a lot of accomplishments, most of us are still living in some sort of desert of shallow effects.”

For Kurosky, the period dominated by his illnesses and convalescence—occurring not long after he broke up his band—provided ample time for self-reflection and an opportunity to reassess his identity.  “For eight years,” he says, “I was Miles from Beulah.  What does that mean exactly? I gained so much perspective about who I am.”

As he began to consider where he wanted to go next as a musician after the band’s 2004 demise—after four well-received albums—Kurosky knew that he definitely did not want to take the solo acoustic route that so many singer-songwriter-musicians do after leaving a band.  “I wanted to evolve,” he says. “We all want to be something greater than what we truly are when we stare at ourselves naked in the mirror. For me, musically, that’s always more instruments.”

With help from Crews—who Kurosky calls “my co-conspirator on the album”—the album that would become The Desert of Shallow Effects began taking shape. It ultimately emerged as a larger-than-life post-pop masterwork, its tracks a pastiche of all manner of stringed instruments and keyboards, horns and percussion—all in service to the voice and words of Miles Kurosky. 

For fans of Beulah who’ve been wondering for so long now when that band’s creative center would re-emerge and what direction he might take, The Desert of Shallow Effects will feel comfortable but also surprising and fresh.  “At the end of the day I was part of that band,” says Miles. “I wrote all the songs, so I can’t get away from it and it’s silly to run away from your past.  To me this album sounds like a logical progression, almost as if I was still in Beulah and I took it to another level. I think it’s different but only because I’m different as a human being and as a songwriter.”