Beach House - The House of Dreams

The story of Beach House begins in 2004. Around that time, Victoria Legrand, born in Paris but raised in Philadelphia – granddaughter of the celebrated French composer Michel Legrand and singer Christine Legrand – decides to leave the École Internationale de Théâtre "Jacques Lecoq", where she had gone back to earn her acting diploma, and follow her instinct across the ocean, toward the more modest and "affordable" Baltimore. There she meets Alex Scally, an eccentric geology student who had meanwhile become a carpenter's apprentice, and the two click instantly. They're drawn to each other from the very first moment, sharing a passion for little organs and vintage sounds. Shortly after, the Beach House project is born. In no time, the duo develops an intriguing sound, enveloping, dreamlike, shimmering on an acoustic level, able to conjure up angels and demons in a single stroke. Everything flows into an anesthetic, persuasive stream of honeyed chords and tipsy rhythms, while the absence of any fixed direction leaves the two free from the burden of new commitments. In fact, their palette is made up essentially of three elements: slide guitar, keyboard and programmed drums. The result is free of any outside artifice.

At first glance, one might immediately think of plenty of other self-sufficient acts, above all the Swedish duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums. But it's in the melodic approach bordering on the fairy-tale, in the opiate shaping of each individual nuance, that Beach House leave an indelible mark on the listener that escapes, even if only in part, any possible comparison. The songs follow a carousel that might lead our dreams back to the most celestial Mazzy Star, or to the more recent Brightblack Morning Light, by way of Sugar Plant, Big Star and Galaxie 500. But that's just a pleasant game of circumstantial connections and echoes. The duo's strength lies entirely in the dazzling fluorescence of the melodies that Scally extracts with such grace, and in Legrand's warm, husky voice, in her captivating expressiveness. It's no coincidence that the singer-keyboardist herself provides Beach House with a visual and lyrical soul, underscoring the need to pair the sound with a striking visual impact as well.

The first fruit of this work, "Apple Orchard", is released into the ether in 2005 through a wonderful homemade video shot aboard the Bullet Train connecting Philadelphia and New York. And just ten days after going online, thousands of clicks already loudly confirm its worth. Thus, Beach House officially make their way into bedrooms across half the world. On this point, Legrand would repeatedly say she wanted to put together a DVD collecting all the band's videos, confirming what had originally been intended.

Another fundamental aspect in the evolution of the Beach House sound is the live dimension. From their very first steps, the pair tour far and wide across all the major cities in the States, eventually covering as many as sixty-four dates in seventeen states, strengthening a partnership that was already unbreakable and sharpening, with every show, an increasingly distinct identity. Cat Power, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes and Dum Dum Girls take notice one after another, to name just a few of the notable artists the two go on to support.

But it's the cinematic quality given to the music that inspires Victoria Legrand more than anything else. A self-declared fan of David Lynch, the former Parisian theatre student has never hidden her obsession with acting and stage gesture. And so terror, understood as ecstatic possession – a dominant element in the complex visual structures of the director from Missoula – becomes a source of inspiration for the duo's compositions. This partly shows in their self-titled debut Beach House, an album that displays the symptoms of a deep unease, disguised beneath a dreamy, ethereal, swaying sonic blend. Opening the curtain is a music box turning slowly, always in the same direction, while an out-of-tune organ pushes forward a soporific dirge. In the background, Legrand seems to drift off into an overwhelming sleep.

The album is marked by a melodramatic decadence pushed into a lo-fi climax thick with electronic evaporations, muffled vocal phrasing and noir whispers. The lyrics tell of orchards where one can restore one's senses ("Apple Orchard"), of unconditional love ("Saltwater"), of sacrifices, waiting and blank pages to fill ("Auburn And Ivory"), of broken hearts made of tears and smiles with golden teeth ("Heart And Lungs"). Everything turns toward lost love or an extreme mastery over one's partner. And so, the physical warmth of the beloved becomes oxygen for the lungs. Through her words, Legrand treads the paths of a new kind of neo-romanticism, where physicality and dominance prevail over the reasons of heart and mind. The album contains, albeit in a still-raw form, the future coordinates of the Beach House project.

Having shaken off the exhaustion of their first productive efforts, in 2008 the two decide to set a new dance in motion. Devotion gathers the fragments of the self-titled debut into an even more honeyed, enchanted slow-core puzzle. A sequence of dream-pop songs that flow like elegies, sad and joyful, sweet and old-fashioned at once. A perpetual sonic flow evokes a distant allure and stages a creature lost in a sea of light. Victoria is an exile, both seductress and seduced by the dreamlike, symbolic deluge scattered throughout the harmonies. Her vocalizations are tender, breathless folds of pain, almost emanating from the surroundings themselves; contemplations of a Joan of Arc wrapped in coils of panic, lost in the abyss. The keyboards and guitars radiate the vivid, desolate colours of a sunset, echoing passion. The singing is placid and ascetic, like a suspended, ethereal dream. The listener follows, persuaded, its magnetic, piercing ascents within a frame of dazzling decadence, in the web of a noble, sensual nostalgic weight that saturates the space ("Gila", "All The Years"). The musical dye stretches out and becomes an unshakeable yearning, wrapped in an aura of nameless desire that transcends mere atmospheric drapery. Romantic modulations stirred by the wind saturate the senses.

It's the duo's masterpiece, their enchanted peak. "Devotions" and celebrations will follow from across the web and from a good number of independent magazines.

The two gain, in fact, a level of recognition that will lead them all the way to top indie producer Chris Coady (Blonde Redhead, Celebration, Architecture In Helsinki, Tv On The Radio, Foals, and many others). The result is a greater sonic fidelity, the long-awaited landing on solid ground, the solution that cleanses and liberates. Teen Dream is a lush, decisive synthesis, a meticulous and alluring reaction. Victoria's emotional charms grow ever more effective, as she once again embodies the restless queen of the island, the sovereign of ancient highlands and motionless, breathing sunsets, who loses her gaze out at sea. While the vintage instrumentation stays the same, the outlines are sharper than in the past, giving Coady plenty to work with. The tones are refined, the form meticulous, the chromatic surfaces polished without dulling their ardour or chipping away at the ecstasy.

On Teen Dream, the house on the beach is a refuge and a shelter free of torment. Amid waiting and promises, there's room for nothing but dreams, and tracks like "Zebra", "Used To Be", "Norway", "Silver Soul", "Lover Of Mine", "Better Times", "Real Love", "Take Care"… all reveal the intoxicating breath of the classic and overflow with clear light; pale glimmers of atmospheric enchantment, joining water and sky.

The undertow of strings and keyboards, of organs and bells invites the guest to stay and look within, to stoke the fire, to become one with it all. The beach is right there, adorned with waves, dunes and evocative dwellings for scattered hearts.

Two years on from the success of Teen Dream, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand carry on confidently remodeling their lovely little beach house, polishing up vintage organs and tinting the walls in pastel colors. Having definitively put away the lo-fi first cries of their first two albums, with Bloom (their fourth album in six years) Beach House seem to have happily settled into a brilliant, meticulous dream-pop formula. Hence greater care over every single detail, and melodies even more enchanted and graceful, underscoring their ability to captivate the listener through a lush, passion-charged pop neoromanticism.

Putting Bloom on the stereo is like being invited to a party where every room is carefully decked out with flowers and balloons to be happily popped as you pass through, amid plays of light and dazzling smiles. The celestial atmospheres thus take on an even more absolute centrality, and every phlegmatic beginning is followed by an explosion of joy in which to cradle one's dreams ("Wishes", "Lazuli"), with good old Scally ever more at ease playing the arranger disguised as a jester. And even when an unusual melancholy seems to creep in for a few moments, it's Legrand's familiar dreamy vocal suspension that lightens the mood ("Troublemaker").

If Teen Dream laid the groundwork for a "new" celestial path, Bloom wonderfully traces a dream-pop formula never so perfectly recognizable, fully confirming the quality and the precious compositional gifts of the Baltimore duo.

In August 2015 comes the hugely anticipated Depression Cherry, the album that confirms the duo as the best possible standard-bearer for whatever remains of dream-pop in the new millennium. Beach House continue writing the hypothetical soundtrack to a daydream capable of cradling the listener and transporting them into a wonderfully oneiric dimension. An ethereal, hazy, almost enchanted world, perfected through stunningly beautiful records made of intense, moving songs, built around Victoria's sensual voice and her sinuous synths at the center of the stage, enriched by Alex's gentle guitar inlays and a drum machine accompanying with due discretion. It's pointless to look within these grooves for some Copernican revolution: Beach House barely move, almost not at all, from their rock-solid musical center of gravity — just listen to the seductive "Space Song", the jewel in the crown of "Depression Cherry", essentially a new "Wishes", a track that keeps its ties to the past firmly intact. In the following "Beyond Love", one of those heartbreaking songs that should be outlawed, the unmistakable electric stigmata arrive to complete an emotional picture with few equals in the world. The hypnotic "10:37" and the sugary "Wildflower" remain on the margins of the record's other cornerstone, "PPP", closed by a sumptuous instrumental coda where simple but effective guitar lines take over.

Mrs. Legrand fixes the sonic drones with her right hand while her other hand embroiders melodies; over musical phrases sent into loops, the two members of Beach House improvise for hours, and what ends up committed to record is nothing but the best possible synthesis of their compositional process, perfectly represented by the evolution of the opening "Levitation". On Depression Cherry almost everything is deliberately left in a minimal state, a sort of return to simplicity; everything is measured, a melancholic ecstasy that remains delicate even when the rhythmic and vocal setup comes to brush against the most opiate My Bloody Valentine ("Sparks"). Supremely refined inlayers of infallible melodies, Beach House pull off yet another compositional miracle, wholesome nourishment for the soul that finds its epilogue in the celestial "Days Of Candy", a eucharistic farewell, a little angelic symphony of ascension — and if you leave the player on repeat, it will start again from "Levitation", and the magic will never end.

With Depression Cherry, the Baltimore-based duo remains artistically true to themselves, while adding nine pure diamonds to their already precious haul. If you're an incurable romantic, if you want an album that embodies the melancholy of autumn now at the door, if you need to fall in love again, or to have your heart torn apart, if from music you seek emotions able to creep inside you on tiptoe and slowly tear you apart, well, Depression Cherry won't be just one of the albums of the year for you — it will be one of the albums of your life.

Just two months later, on October 16, 2015, announced only a week in advance, another Beach House album arrives unexpectedly, presented by the duo not as a collection of alternate versions or potential b-sides, but as a genuine new record: Thank Your Lucky Stars. Caught up in an unstoppable burst of inspiration, the Baltimore duo could have taken the best of both albums and made an unassailable masterpiece, but when it came to choosing the tracklist for the follow-up to "Bloom", they couldn't whittle it down below 18 tracks, and decided instead to give authority and independence to a bouquet of songs that sit very well together, releasing them as Thank Your Lucky Stars. Just as with Depression Cherry, here too we find no revolution in Beach House's sound or style; if anything, the level of melancholy rises, up to critical levels (just listen to "She's So Lovely", a sort of less flashy twin of "Beyond Love"), and the band's standing as the foremost representative of contemporary dream-pop only grows.

With Thank Your Lucky Stars, Beach House perfect a kind of return to the simplicity of their earliest releases, to the atmospheres that characterized their first output: everything goes back to being rarefied, at times even steeped in apparent stasis (as in "Common Girl"), although every now and then a small wall of guitars looms on the horizon ("One Thing"). Without quite matching the phenomenal peaks of "Depression Cherry", this new work by Victoria and Alex Scally manages to reach the same average quality, thanks to the absence of filler or weak tracks, and thanks to the presence of the memorable "Elegy To The Void", the longest and most beautiful song on the record, in which well-mannered pop surges into an emotional crescendo, slowly morphing into light shoegaze. Dreamy, nocturnal, hazy, elegant, sensual, infinitely melodic, Thank Your Lucky Stars is the album that changes Beach House's destiny, because when a band manages to release two such strong works within a couple of months, it steps out of the respectability of its own niche and becomes an institution. The world built by Victoria and Alex is a comforting one, in which every indie dreamer feels at home, sealed by the old-fashioned atmospheres of "Somewhere Tonight", which seem to emerge from an old faded photograph — perhaps the very one on the cover — and so the circle closes, as if by magic. Keep Thank Your Lucky Stars close, let it breathe, savor it slowly, and set it aside for your unforgettable nights — you won't regret it.

In late June 2017, to while away the wait between the unexpected pairing of Depression Cherry/Thank Your Lucky Stars and their next studio work, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally release B-Sides And Rarities, a collection gathering all the B-sides and outtakes scattered or left in a drawer across more than ten years of the first stretch of their career: 14 tracks between alternate takes and previously unreleased material that never appeared on any of the six albums issued up to that point. The final result shines through its consistency, proof of how steadily the Baltimore duo have moved along the same tracks all along — those of a deeply emotional dream-pop, in which the synths and Victoria's voice stand out, comfortably resting on the soft carpets built by Alex's drums and guitar. To make the compilation even more intriguing, Beach House include two unreleased tracks, "Chariot" and "Baseball Diamond", both drawn from the sessions that led to the two 2015 albums, plus their own highly personal cover of "Play The Game" by Queen, originally released in 2008 on an album supporting AIDS research (the band continue to donate all proceeds from the exploitation of their version to that cause).

From some notes written by the duo, we learn that the oldest song included is "Rain In Numbers", dating back to 2005, one of the band's first makeshift recordings, made using a friend's out-of-tune piano (they didn't yet own one) and the microphone of a portable four-track with which they captured everything: the track originally became the ghost track on their self-titled debut. "I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun" is the remastered version of the gift given to fans right after the 2010 tour, made available at the time online as a free download; "Wherever You Go", meanwhile, was a secret song on "Bloom". "Saturn Song" and "Equal Mind" came out of the same sessions; the latter in particular wasn't included on "Bloom" simply because it had exactly the same tempo as "Other People" and "They Are Like Twins". There are also alternate takes of already-released songs, such as "White Moon" and "Norway" (both taken from a live session for iTunes and remixed to fit the duo's current aesthetic) and "10 Mile Stereo", presented here in a remixed version. "Norway" in particular features an alternate bridge compared to the version released on "Teen Dream". All these songs are thus rescued from the risk of eternal oblivion, and with B-Sides And Rarities the goal is perfectly achieved: rounding out the picture of the output of the most important dream-pop band of the new millennium.

Launching Beach House's seventh album, titled with no frills simply 7, are the singles "Lemon Glow" and "Dive". The first, deliberately dropped on Valentine's Day and accompanied by a message wishing all lovers well on their Instagram profile, is a love ballad that follows all of the duo's usual stylistic hallmarks, with the piano tracing sinuous orbits in the background, and Scally's guitar at once searing and restrained. A track that seems to come straight from what still stands today as the couple's masterpiece, Devotion. "Dive", for its part, turns the clock back even further, recapturing the essentialism of their self-titled debut, with Legrand wrapped in an extremely soft, as ever supremely soothing melodic flow. A lullaby that only half-recalls their earliest past, before the rhythm section kicks into gear and sends us into a perfectly measured, ecstatic crescendo.

7 is an album that stakes its claim along a rope suspended in mid-air, among the clouds, in a delicate balance of dreams and disillusionment, as well expressed by the lyrics of "Lose Your Smile": "Lose your smile/ Dreams, baby, do come true". Such a mix signals a wise compositional alternation, with lyrics more varied than ever, poised between emotional empathy and heartbreak. Adding a further brushstroke of psychedelia to the walls of this house is, moreover, former Spacemen 3 member Peter Kember, who unofficially assists the two friends behind the mixing desk. And the results are audible, especially in the hypnotic loop of "Woo", perfectly in line with the drifting sounds of good old Peter's main band.

An album that thus splits between the more comforting Cocteau Twins-style dream-pop, as in the choral "L'Inconnue", complete with sections in French — a land dear to Legrand's heart, having been born in Paris but raised in Philadelphia, and above all being the granddaughter of the illustrious French composer Michel Legrand and the singer Christine Legrand, likewise linked to the École Internationale de Théâtre "Jacques Lecoq", where she had gone back to earn her acting diploma, before settling in sober, "affordable" Baltimore — and swift noir sketches that leave listeners stunned in their own way, highlighted by the hypnotic pace of "Black Car".

There's certainly no shortage of the usual heavenly suspension that sweeps everything along with it, see the pulse of "Pay No Mind" and the alluring "Girl Of the Year" — the latter track inspired by one of Andy Warhol's superstars, Edie Sedgwick, who in 1965 was known precisely as "Girl of the Year" — and, in other ways, by the dual nature of women, often overwhelmed by excessive fragility while at the same time drawn to the allure of self-destruction.

7 is, in the end, a welcome return, and gives us a Beach House that is damned alive and inspired, sinuous and elegant.

The sonic landscapes and psychic colors of 7, the pulsing of stars and the crackling of comets wrapped in the silken folds of its eleven compositions, remain the reference points for the imposing, ambitious new work the duo announced in the autumn of 2021. It's a collection made up of eighteen songs, split into four chapters released roughly a month apart from one another. Once Twice Melody (2022) is a narrative, an emotional trajectory. The decidedly psychedelic videos accompanying each track seem to suggest Victoria and Alex's intent to venture beyond a purely rational, sensory experience. And while the duo's music has always moved at the edges of that threshold, now it tries to cross it, to brush against and penetrate the walls of the Otherworldly. To render such a journey in music, Beach House had to adopt a symbolic, expressionistic language capable of shading and painting this infinity-craving mental space in vivid colors. And so Victoria sketches cosmic backdrops, inner soliloquies in the belly of the sky, and monologues that seem to hover in universal emptiness, yet are actually addressed to some celestial consistory.

The opening chapter is perhaps the one marked by the most abstract language, and it also anticipates and stages the conflicted movement running through the whole record: the contrast between the idyll of budding love and the moment the relationship shatters, between the sweet remembrance of the joyful period and the painful memory of its end. The duo settles into the contrastive dynamic of this interstitial space and explores the emotional carousel dwelling within it. "Pink Funeral," perhaps the emblematic example of this exploratory adventure, is a true requiem for Love, hovering between sinister orchestrations and lush rosy tones, nostalgia and ecstasy, funeral lament and an unforgettable sunset.

It's the little organs of Devotion filtered through the romanticism of Depression Cherry that usher the listener into the album's second chapter. Here, in the first three tracks, we move away from the previous abstraction and embrace a more tangible, concrete dimension. The interstitial space of the realm of Love is now observed from a different angle, and the themes of flight, distance, and the premonition of a love affair's end become central.

Were it not for the unexpected synthetic waves of "Masquerade," the third chapter would be the most "classically Beach House" of the four. Here we find melancholic atmospheres, twilight lights, halos of stardust ("Sunset" and "Illusion of Forever"), shimmering keyboard arpeggios ("Only You Know"), vocal effects and filters, smoky organ beds ("Another Go Around"), and that beat on "Illusion Of Forever" that immediately brings back the tactile memory of Depression Cherry's red velvet.

The closing chapter is the most introspective and solipsistic: the light of the other grows faint and the inner monologue takes over. And while the starry firmament looms large in its immensity, the ballads "The Bells" and "Many Nights" revive a narcoleptic dream-pop, mindful of the artistic legacy of Mazzy Star. Yet before the grand finale of "Modern Love Stories," there's room for the luminous romanticism of "Hurts To Love," a veritable hymn to love and life that condenses the essence of the Baltimore duo's musical spirit into a few minutes.

Once Twice Melody is a grand, multifaceted album, defined by a majestic sound that fully exploits the brand-new orchestral arrangements Beach House made use of. It's the summa of the duo's different sides, but also, and above all, pure melody, angelic and dreamlike. There isn't a single weak moment in this collection of songs, and the web of intratextual echoes running through it is extremely dense.

It may not end up their most beautiful record, nor the most beloved, but it undoubtedly stands as the definitive monolith of their career. If and when they decide to return, Alex and Victoria will have to start from scratch. The embrace of cosmic breath has put an end to an artistic arc that finds few equals in the independent music landscape of the last twenty years. And if this, then, is the end, a new beginning will be needed. A beginning that will have to draw on this recent experience and that will, once again, have to head into that Beyond which only Beach House are capable of picturing or, better, imagining.

Once Twice Melody didn't exhaust the material composed during the recording sessions: more than a year later, five more tracks were gathered on the EP Become, assembled for Record Store Day 2023. These are songs that show both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Legrand/Scully partnership, capable of building marvelous dreamy, suspended, ethereal atmospheres, but at the same time of dutifully repeating the same clichés already trodden - and better - several times in the past.

It's material the pair didn't deem good enough to make the tracklist of "Once Twice Melody," which says a lot, but the duo's flair still produces results that are never less than interesting. Become is therefore worth a listen, whether for the strong internal cohesion it displays, or for the controlled crescendo of "American Daughter" that brings us back to the light shoegaze of 7, or for the sensual embrace of "Devil's Pool," or for the enveloping chorus worn by the sinuous guitars on "Black Magic," or for certain wave-leaning detours taken by the title track. It's them, Beach House, inside Become - you could recognize them even from light-years away.

Contributions by Daniel Moor ("Once Twice Melody")

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