Beach House- Bloom

Dream-pop is a genre label that I find overly vague and yet also dead-on. Even as it applies to a wide array of bands, it paradoxically fits them all, too. Beach House's music, for instance, seems perfectly encapsulated by the term: it's dream-like, to be sure, suffused with spacious atmospheres and a floating feeling, and it's pop-y, too, because the songs are pretty and catchy.

Bloom is not as immediate and catchy as Teen Dream, but in terms of sheer dreamy atmosphere, no other record they've done matches it. Bloom seems patent-made to be treasured forever with its ancestors, like The Cocteau Twins' Treasure, by people who enjoy gray, rainy afternoons and spend a lot of time alone. The atmosphere and feeling of Bloom is what I imagine Zoloft or cough syrup highs are like, a sort of half-awake reverie; a physical sensation of floating in mid-air as if in a pool of water.

I've had a tricky time falling for this record, chiefly because I think the band are just on a plateau after Teen Dream and have let some of the sharp hooks and melodies slide in favor of the aforementioned atmosphere. However, I have to say, while this band's albums may require more patience than usual, they always pay off. The first few times I listened to Bloom, I thought it was half-finished and lazy. The songs are all longer than four minutes (the shortest one, 'The Hours', is one of the better songs, by the by) and the whole thing required a conscious commitment to listen to on my part instead of the endless replay-ability of Teen Dream and Devotion.

Now, though, the slow burn of tracks like 'Lazuli' and 'Other People' sound less like lazy coasting and more like a confident band maturing further in how they write and structure songs, easing into effortless songwriting style that takes a few listens to reveal itself. This is the level The Walkmen reached with the underrated You & Me, and The National hit with the (slightly) overrated High Violet. Not to mention, there is a lot to be said for basking in the intoxicating glow this band offers. If Bloom isn't as impressive and immediate as Teen Dream, it's still damn impressive, and nearly as good. It just takes some time to, uhm, bloom.

11 Stray Thoughts

1) The new album by Beach House, Bloom, is pretty good even though it feels more like a slightly different sequel to Teen Dream than the next step in the band's evolution. Don't get me wrong, it's almost as good as Teen Dream. Perhaps the best parallel is Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac; both are great, but the former came first and felt newer/fresher even if many prefer the latter.

2) After spending most of their career using as little instrumentation as possible, and falling more often than not on the dour side of things, The Walkmen have recruited producer Phil Elk and guest Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes to help them expand their sound. The result is arguably the band's best record yet, Heaven.

3) The titles of the new Beach House and The Walkmen albums should be switched. Heaven should be a place of relative stagnation but enjoyment (more like how Beach House's new one feels), whereas Bloom is more fitting for the by turns majestic and uplifting Walkmen record.

4) You should immediately go listen to all the Felt that you can. Such an underrated, under-known band.

5) I've slowly become addicted to Beach Fossils. Their new single, Shallow/Lessons, is fantastic, and I'm definitely anticipating their forthcoming sophomore record with increasing impatience.

6) The Horrors and The Drones are also underrated and under-known bands. The Horrors's Primary Colours sounds like a combination of Liars and My Bloody Valentine. The Drones recorded Gala Mill at the titular mill in an isolated area of Australia, and the atmosphere of that environment permeates these songs. The Drones sound most to me like the rock guitar side of Sun Kil Moon and the impassioned side of Nick Cave combined with bare bones, distorted Spiderland guitars as engineered by Steve Albini.

7) Bardo Pond's 'Back Porch' and 'Tommy Gun Angel' kick incredible amounts of ass.

8) The Days Of Wine & Roses by The Dream Syndicate is a perfect amalgamation of Velvet Underground and The Feelies-esque jangle-pop.

9) Sufjan Steven's Age Of Adz gets better with time.

10) How I Met Your Mother is my new favorite sitcom. Imagine a modern version of Seinfeld, with all the wit, neurotic characters, made up words and terms, and odd misadventures that implies, but actually much better than that comparison makes it sound.

11) Predator 2, as with Ghostbusters 2, is an unfairly maligned sequel to a classic film.

Wye Oak- Civilian

Some bands finally hit their stride after their line-up solidifies around a creative core due to the addition or loss of members. Others because of a style change, a new approach to making music, or any number of other factors. I'm increasingly most impressed by bands who don't radically change anything yet still deliver the best music they've ever made. Whether it's because of a sympatico producer or their first consistently great set of songs, it's comforting to know that not everyone is brilliant straight out of the gate, that it's never too late to turn a corner.

Beach House's Teen Dream was one of the best albums of 2010 despite the fact that the band weren't really doing much different. True, the music was more inviting and bright, but it mainly stuck with their take on dream pop as codified on Devotion. Its greatness lie in the excellent songwriting and engaging vocal performances of Victoria Legrand. Call it finding their voice or maturing as artists. Whatever the label, Wye Oak have taken a similar leap with Civlian even though it sticks close to what they had done before. Singer Jenn Wasner still has that husky/smoky vocal quality akin to, say, PJ Harvey and Nina Nastasia. Meanwhile the music continues to sound like Low with greater loud/quiet dynamics and spikier guitars. Indeed, perhaps a better way to describe them would be like a jam session between Low and Dinosaur Jr. Where Low often go for slow motion minimalism, Wye Oak draw more from dream pop and similar heavily atmospheric music. While not as noisy and overwhelming as shoegazer bands, songs do have moments of intense guitar storms, joyful and cathartic.

In 2009, Wye Oak's The Knot firmly established this aesthetic and came just shy of being their breakthrough; it's the sort of record where I would have a hard time deciding between a four or five star rating. No such handwringing is needed in the case of Civilian. Paralleling similar feelings I had when first listening to Teen Dream, there's an immediate sense that Wye Oak have fully delivered in every possible way. All of the songs are fantastic and both more distinct and more memorable than The Knot. Right off the bat, the band demonstrate greater imagination in songwriting. Album opener 'Two Small Deaths' avoids any expected loud/quiet dynamics, maintaining a mid-tempo movement with clattering percussion and a simple guitar line, blossoming into pretty choruses here and there. 'The Alter' follows and has an up-and-down groove to it, with a gorgeously psychedelic guitar breakdown around the 1:25 mark, all while sounding quite a bit like Beach House thanks to the repeated organ chords. 'Holy Holy' is up next, snarling to life with a noisy guitar right out of the playbook of late 80s/early 90s Sonic Youth.

Even while I find myself comparing Wye Oak to different bands, there remains a nagging voice in my head saying I still haven't nailed down what they sound like. 'Dogs' Eyes' operates under a logic only Wye Oak understands, with loud punishing riffs that would seem to have no place on an album you can compare to Beach House or Low (well, The Great Destroyer aside). At times Civilian sounds like a lost 4AD classic, gothic and folky, songs creeping along like kudzu vine overtaking cemetery gates. At other times, though, there's a glowing, headlong rush to the melodies, to say nothing of the pummeling guitar outbursts, two elements more akin to a band raised on a steady diet of indie rock from the 80s and 90s, when the “rock” part of “indie rock” got as much emphasis as “indie.”

Thus the splendid paradox of Wye Oak: they sound like many other bands, but because of the way they reconfigure these influences and constituent parts, they really don't sound much like other bands. And despite not changing much about their approach to making music or the overall feel of Civilian compared to The Knot, this one is far and away the superior album thanks to a full record's batch of memorable songs.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Re: Views on Beach House's Teen Dream

As promised!

Let me reiterate that from now on I'll be either doing written or video reviews of stuff, never both. It's just kind of redundant and I don't have to change the writing much to adapt it to a video or vice versa.

Beach House- Teen Dream

The cover to Beach House's Devotion has the duo sitting at a fancy dining room table, an orangey red glow given off by candles. Immaculately arranged in front of them are almost perfectly symmetrical objects, right down to the way their hands are positioned. At the very center is a delicious looking cake with the album title on it, flanked by the band's name in wooden letters. It's one of the most memorable album covers in recent memory, but it also captures the dreamy atmosphere of their music almost perfectly. At its warmest moments, Beach House's style has been like an aural approximation of how a room feels during a birthday party with only the candles for light.

However, Beach House's debut and Devotion had their share of coldness and emotional distance, too. This gave the aforementioned 'warm', melodic moments a distinctly memorable contrasting quality that is rare in music. Wha I mean is, a tonal/atmospheric contrast instead of the usual loud/quiet/loud or fast/slow/fast ones. The self titled debut was mostly drowsy and cold, but memorable for songs like 'Auburn And Ivory.' In many ways this track felt like the blueprint for the sophomore release, Devotion: it subsists on chilly keyboards and detached vocals until that astounding moment after the 3:00 mark when singer Victoria Legrand, spurred by a guitar, rises out of her torpor to declare "she says,: 'I'll wait for you, I'll wait for once'" before retreating immediately. Devotion, then, nudged the band progressively toward less atmosphere and a more direct, emotional style of songwriting, and was an excellent album for it. But Teen Dream takes this trend even further, while at the same time focusing ever more on the commanding vocal performances of Legrand.

I'll just come out and say that I've only been listening to Teen Dream for less than 24 hours and it's already going to be on my list for album of the year. It isn't so much a quantum leap over Devotion as it is a perfection and progression of it. The songwriting alone is at that level where, as you listen to the album for the first couple times, you keep thinking to yourself "oh, this is probably going to be my favorite song"...and you keep thinking it...and you keep thinking it, over and over again. I make no exaggeration when I say that there isn't a bad song here. It starts so strongly with 'Zebra', heavenly "ahhh" backing vocals and all, that you're worried the album can't sustain this level of quality...but then it does, and does....and does...and does, all the way to 'Take Care', which is quite possibly the finest straight up love song the band has ever done. And for an album that has no song under four minutes long, it's impressive how succinct and well paced Teen Dream is.

The biggest and best change on Teen Dream is the increased focus and centering of songs around Legrand's vocals. Going back to the band's debut, it's interesting how reserved she sounds, and how her vocals are often used as part of the overall feel and atmosphere of the songs: one more instrument in the mix, rather than the centerpiece. Well, Teen Dream is unfailingly 'warm' in tone, unabashedly melodic, and unquestionably focused on Legrand. Every essential melody comes from her voice, which is the smartest move the band could've made, since she has become a much more expressive and varied singer since Devotion. Perhaps it was in her all along but it didn't work for the older songs, who knows. I'm tempted to use terms like "powerhouse" for a song like 'Better Times', where she shows more range and imagination in delivery than she did on all of Beach House's debut. The bit at 2:33...well, you'll see.

Uhm, hear.

Teen Dream is the kind of album that a band builds a reputation on. Everything that is good about this band is at its utmost best here, fully revealing not just a duo with a distinctive style, but also one with a surprising amount of diversity within said style. Frankly it's impossible to imagine anyone covering anything from this album and doing it justice. A song like 'Real Love' losing Victoria Legrand's voice would be all but ruined; I can't think of anyone else that could sing "boo, boo, boo" and make you really feel it instead of thinking it was silly. Teen Dream isn't a huge leap from their previous work, but, like Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest, it's at least several large steps, leaving the listener in love with what is and impatient to hear what may be.

Video: Beach House- Heart of Chambers

As I gave Devotion album of the week, it should be apparent that I like it a lot. But I figured I would share this video so you have some inkling of why I like it so much. Plus I love any video that tells some kind of narrative but isn't terribly specific about what's going on.

I don't know why, but seeing her push him around in a shopping cart is kind of funny.

Album of the Week: Beach House- Devotion

"Music is kind of like a dream for me...The dream brings me closer to my soul."
--Mike Gordon

When you listen to Beach House, time seems to slow down. Though Devotion is only 44 minutes long it seems to be fed into the IV tube of your soul (or heart, if you prefer), a constant steady drip feed of beauty, melody, organs, guitars, subtle/minimalist electronic drums, and reverb drenched production. That 44 minutes drifts through your opium-like daze for what feels like an hour and a half. It is music that on the surface sounds lonely, despairing, and desolate but on closer inspection blooms into a world of color and warmth, filling the room with sound.

Certain music has the power to color and distort the world around you, forcing you to, say, quicken down your pace while out for a walk, to make people around you seem crueler and more unrecognizable, or to make what is otherwise a silent, still room burst with life and sound. Devotion does this last one, but it isn't a loud rock album; that's not how it fills the room. All of its frequencies worm their way into every crevice and open space, somehow even its silences resounding back at you, tiny organ notes or wordless sigh choruses wrapping you in a sound. Rarely with an album so subdued and quiet do I feel the silence between songs just as much as I hear it.

Dream pop is a sub-genre of music that, at least for my taste, walks a fine line between too relaxed/patient and just relaxed/patient enough. The Cocteau Twins never hooked me but Beach House sure has. All of the ideas and sounds on Devotion were present on Beach House's self-titled debut but they weren't as developed or well executed as they are here. You may need to give it a few chances to 'get' what is so astonishing about it; soon, though, its hazy, lovely sounds and deliberate melodies will creep into--yes--your dreams and daydreams, bubbling below the surface to pop up during various parts of the day. Listening to Devotion at work on headphones, hardly paying attention to it or listening to it in bed before I fall asleep...through both methods it has seeped into me like a bag of tea steeping in a pot of scalding hot water. Victoria Legrand's laments about the loss of and joyous pledges of love continue to resonate with me for reasons I can't really explain. "Resonate" is a great word to use here because not since Galaxie 500 has of reverb seemed so essential to a band's sound. True, Legrand's voice would be mesmerizing without it, but it's that same difference between hearing Galaxie 500's 'Tugboat' without reverb on the live versions and hearing it with it on the studio one. It's still a great song, but that reverb takes on a life of its own, the slight echoes as important as the origin itself. So it is with her voice, as if her voice isn't a singular thing but holds the weight of a chorus in its clutches.

I doubt if anyone who's never been in love will feel the same about Devotion because it is a work so bound up in the feelings associated with romance and the loss thereof. Animal Collective's Feels was described by the band as their 'love' album, and every song on that album has an euphoria about it that registers with you subconsciously far before you come to the conclusion after examining the lyrics. Devotion is a slipperier creature. It's not so overt with its concept onn a subconcious level and is both more measured about love and goes to greater depths on a conscious/lyrical one. After all, it's one thing to sing, as the Collective did, "I got a big big big heart beat yeah, I think you are the sweetest thing" and another, as Beach House does, to sing about devotion--not religious, mind you--at least twice on an album named Devotion. To devote yourself to someone, this is not something you say lightly. That religious connotation is there even if you've used the word so often in a non-religious context that most of that is lost. This album may remind you of similarly strong feelings you've had for someone, wanting to do everything you can to make them happy and to feel loved.

Devotion was one of 2008's most overlooked and underrated releases. Even I didn't get around to it until this year. If you're at all inclined to the idea of music that is dreamy, slow, and hazy yet conjures up feelings of love and cozy warmth, Devotion is a must buy.