Beach House, an indie-pop duo, played to one of their largest crowds ever in Central Park in 2012. The band, featuring Victoria Legrand on vocals and keyboards and Alex Scally on guitar, had already been well-known in Baltimore’s alternative music community before expanding their fan base internationally.
In addition to being dreamy and impressionistic, the music was also slow and laborious. It had become a shorthand for “dream-pop,” joining a canon that included everything from the Beastie Boys through My Bloody Valentine.
On their 2006 first album, simply titled Beach House, Legrand and Scally utilised only a guitar, a Yamaha piano, and an organ to create a thick, lo-fi shell of muffled voices sound that drew from diddly, drones, and shoegaze yet sounded entirely new. Whatever chemistry was created among Legrand and Scally gave the music a mystical air.
A more polished and majestic sound was added to their music over time, but they never abandoned the dreamy quality or the underlying simplicity of their music, which was often constructed on only a few chords looped over and over. When listened to in its whole, their album’s music became as mesmerising and rhythmic as an electrocardiograph.
Their Work History At Beach House
In 2012, with the release of their fourth studio album, “Bloom,” Summer House has reached the pinnacle of cult success. In his song “Money Trees,” Kendrick Lamar sampled Beach House’s “Silver Soul,” and the Weeknd included a Beach House song on his breakthrough mixtape, “House of Balloons.”
The Central Park performance by Beach House was curtailed short due to impending bad weather. ‘I think it’s a little of destiny,’ Legrand recently informed the British music publication NME.
When things seem like they might reach a breaking point, they somehow never do. It was like betraying themselves to enjoy their sudden fame.
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Music listeners commonly hold the view that originality is the cornerstone of creative excellence. In the streaming era, which places a premium on originality, musicians must constantly push the envelope if they want to succeed. This was valid for David Bowie or Prince, as it is frequently true for artists today.
A counter to our preoccupation with innovation is seen in Beach House’s catalogue, which is graceful and stubbornly even.
Over the class of fifteen years as well as 8 album covers (all of which are excellent in their own right), the duo has stayed true to their stylistic precepts while many of their contemporaries have split up, pursued solo careers, dabbled in different types of music, and opened their documents to a wide variety of collaborators.
Scally expressed his distaste for musical evolution between albums to an interviewer in 2012. Integrity is the most important value within Legrand and Scally’s universe, and it rests on the twin pillars of having a clear goal and sticking to it.
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Additionally, The Rest Of The Things
This is the second time I’ve used this phrase after “Bloom.” After a little interlude, Beach House cut “Depression Cherry.” In a statement accompanying the album’s 2015 release, the band members used resolute and even pious language to explain why they were leaving the mainstream music scene.
Here, i continue to enable ourselves to change without any consideration for the economic environment in which we operate.
It was the first of two albums they released that year, and on it, the band toned down the album’s signature drum sound to a ticker-tape whisper. The volume and tenor of Legrand’s voice changed, and they added other instruments like a choir. The wailing of Scally’s slide guitar gave some tracks a darker and more evocative tone.
At the risk of becoming repetitive, this album was a welcome return to form, with several songs featuring soft, lilting melodies.
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That’s not to imply that Beach House is always playing it safe with their music. Its albums are like long stretches of shingle beach: they look homogeneous from a distance but are brimming with unique characteristics up close.
For their most recent studio album, 2018’s “7,” the band branched out, adding European vocalists, a distort pedal, and an expansive brand of psychedelic music. Its latest album, “Once Twice Melody,” is the most ambitious and exciting work the band has ever done.
The record has been released in installments, with the last one coming later this month. Without a doubt, this is a Beach House album, but it’s also a sprawling, often fanciful endeavour adorned with huge orchestral flourishes and ’80s synth-pop glitz.
It’s the band’s least focused record to date, yet it’s so sublimely imagistic that you have to ask why filmmakers and music supervisors haven’t been begging Legrand and Scally to soundtrack movies.
Despite her classical training, Legrand’s singing often comes out as more natural than technical. She speaks in a deep, androgynous voice that is reminiscent of Nico’s cold drawl.
She avoids narration in favour of lyrical sketches, leaving the listener to imagine the rest of the story. She sings, “It is happening again” on the achingly droned “Silver Soul.”
But it’s not clear if “it” refers to a catastrophic event or a miraculous one. In a time when subscription services have largely replaced genres with emotions as the primary way of categorization, Beach House’s propensity towards emotional ambiguity is one of their small acts of resistance. (Some upbeat tunes are included.) Listen to this soothing music while you unwind.
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Conclusion
When it comes to mood, songs by Beach House may blur the lines between melancholy and elation without ever forcing the listener to choose between the two extremes.
