If it aint broke, dont fix it, as the old saying goes, and it continues to apply to so many bands who trip over though themselves in an attempt to improve the quality of their music. Thank heaven, , for the ones who dont pay attention to the cliché and surface with something greater than anyone could have expected. Last year, Burial dropped my jaw to the floor when he released Untrue--a record that was a thousand times better than his rock-solid eponymous debut. Burial picked up on a unique sound and saw it to its logical endpoint, but Untrue had the power to move you to awe and great swells of emotion, and you could live in it. And now, Beach House is finding itself in a similar scenario, in which the limitations of their seemingly faultless first record only become apparent after the quietly stunning Devotion eclipses it in nearly every way. When the bands debut, Beach House, dropped in October 2006, it heightened our awareness of the current fall season. With only the sparest of parts--a guitar, a keyboard, a voice and a drum machine, recorded onto a four-track--the duo of Victoria Legrand (01) and Alex Scally squeezed out fuzzy, creaky love songs that felt like being draped in a timeworn blanket or an elegant coat from long ago. It wasnt autumn as experienced outdoors, but autumn as viewed from the window of a living room covered in deep browns and faded yellows. On their second record, Beach House have opened up their sound, for lack of a better term, and given it room to breathe. The melodies are sweeter, the songs more compositionally complex, the sound--my goodness, that sound! No longer tied to a four-track, Beach House trades fuzz for a gossamer echo thats guaranteed to put a lump in your throat, and these uniformly wonderful songs resonate as clear as a bell. It wasnt that Beach House was inferior or less than mellifluous--perhaps just more closed-off than it could have been. On Devotion, Beach House lets you fully inside. Its entirely possible to pass through Devotion without understanding a single word. I imagine that this is just fine with Legrand, since she mentioned in an interview with the Miscellany News that listeners should take her lyrics and create their own personally relevant dramas from them. Even without all of the vocals being clear, however, certain themes on Devotion reveal themselves through more unexpected avenues. The track titles refer to concepts like love (You Came to Me, D.A.R.L.I.N.G.), travel (Turtle Island, Astronaut,), and celebration (Wedding Bell, Holy Dances), and because these themes can be easily connected to each other, Devotion works fantastically well as a whole. The waltzing, swinging rhythms likewise seem to sweep you up and whisk you somewhere far away. Beach House understands and capitalizes on musics possibility as a transportive device; at its most evocative, Devotion can take you to places unknown, treasured or both. Yes, Devotion really is that good. Beach House had exactly one knockout track, Apple Orchard, that elevated the record beyond where it otherwise would have been. Their Apple Orchard this time out is Holy Dances, Devotions exotic and stupefyingly amazing centerpiece. Its melodies seem to be infused with cane sugar, and the way the toms and hand-bells slide from rhythm to rhythm with such effortless grace brings to mind a fluid, undulating body movement--halfway between a dance and a soft caress. Astronaut lives up to its title with its otherworldly, glimmering keyboards that shoot listeners into a crystalline solar system, as does Wedding Bell, a celebratory song that--were it a half-step slower--would make the perfect wedding dance at the hippest reception in town. As for the other tracks on Devotion, well, youll have to take my word that theyre all freaking gorgeous--every single one of them. And then theres the matter of Legrands voice, possibly the most divisive constituent at the Beach House party. Its husky, and doesnt sound particularly feminine on its own, and the four-track recorder that the duo used on their debut didnt lend it very much allure. Thats all behind us now. With Devotions vastly higher fidelity and misty echo effect, Legrand is given the space to stretch herself and try out her surprisingly wide range, and she sounds, finally, like an angel. But the improvement also has to do with Legrand herself, how shes exponentially more confident and at times even extroverted (she nearly belts on Wedding Bell), as though Beach House were a merely a dry run for the real thing. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay her is that her voice doesnt seem to come from a human in a recording studio, but arises out of nature like a phenomenon too beautiful to comprehend. For all the talk about changes, its easy to forget that Beach House are largely sticking to what theyve been doing all along. Two albums into their career, theyre still recognizably themselves and havent made much effort to shake up their winning formula. They havent added any woodwinds or zithers or even a bassist, and beneath the guitars and keyboards ticks the steady pulse of that drum machine theyve kept in tow, reinforcing the fact that this music is still being made by two people. Like Burial before them, what Beach House have actually done is zeroed in on a fantastic idea and nearly perfected it, while bearing the precious human connection in mind. Forget the old, sloppy comparisons to Mazzy Star and Nico; Beach House now sounds like Beach House and nobody else. Their love for what they do is apparent not only in what they say but in what they play, and its their devotion to a sound, a mood, a texture, a lover, a fantasy, that places Devotion already among the best records of 2008. Wedding Bell spins itself a stately, rippling organngrimy riffs framework, with Victoria Legrands pretty, eerie voice singing distantly, Youre ringing the only wedding bell/and were swimming the seas we know so well... I tried to stay in line in our bed/in our heads/Oh, but your wish is my command... Its very catchy in a neo-Victorian shoegazer way, although much catchier than anything that follows. But things get far eerier in You Came to Me, a shimmering ghostly pop ballad punctuated by sweeps of satiny keyboard and timpani. That style carries over into the lilting, swirling sound of Gila, ruled by a truly exquisite organ melody. And not many singers could sing the name of a lizard and actually sound serious. And those songs set the tone for much of the album -- ethereal organ laments, shimmering little pop tunes strung with tambourine and swirling guitar, sparkling melodies with spacey carnival synth, tinkly soaring ballads, and so forth. But it ends as catchily -- if more alluringly -- as it started, with the warm, wobbling Home Again. It sounds exactly as the title would imply. If I had to describe the particular sound of Beach House, Id have to say it sounds like an American Nico... fronting the musical lovechild of Mazzy Star and Goldfrapps latest. Yeah, that sounds weird, but Devotion has qualities of those bands -- the haunting vocals, the swirling shoegazer-like pop balladry, and the sparkling framework of lush, warm electronica. Well, the carnival music doesnt entirely fit in. The first song is a bit of a sore thumb, being rockier and peppier than all the rest -- its lovely, but seems like a hook to draw you in. But after that, the album is enfolded in a swirling mass of swirling ringing guitars and Legrands majestic, shimmering organ. Alex Scally wraps every melody in a elusive, hazy shell of keyboard. And theres a Nicoesque tambourine that gets shaken through some of the songs, as well as that great timpani. Legrands voice is really a lovely one, but filtered to sound powerfully ethereal. She can infuse a feeling of poignant longing into the songs -- they tend to be about loving someone in the moment, or from afar (we still have the summers/to be good to one another), and have moments of truly striking imagery (... spending money/on a desert rose/holy dances and acronyms/for bones
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 00:30:38 +0000
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