(Editor’s Note: You can download Beach House’s track “Lazuli” TODAY only – June 4– as Today’s Top Tune.)
Dreamy KCRW favorites Beach House are back, and in suuuper lush form.
Their recently released 4th album Bloom is a continuation of the woozy lovelorn business they perfected with their critically-acclaimed 2010 French kiss of a record “Teen Dream“. Granted the duo, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, haven’t necessarily altered the DNA of the sound that they’ve been crafting since their 2006 self-titled debut, but what they’ve done is honed it and created something more self-assured. A quality, people will probably start referring to as increasingly, undeniably Beach House-ish.
Although the album has a number of shimmering stunners (Wild, Myth, Lazuli, etc.), Bloom really works best as a complete work. Like a sonic still life, it commands your attention and respect in the way that one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers might. In fact, the experience of listening to Bloom is quite similar.
When looking at sunflowers, there is an immediate matter of style that you can’t escape initially, that hallucinatory, definitively Van Gogh-ish quality. But then you are faced with a moment where you suddenly realize that it is just a painting of sunflowers in a jar in some room somewhere in Paris in the 1880s. And then that same fundamental simplicity then echoes back to you as you realize, oh wow…those are just sunflowers in a jar in some room somewhere in Paris in the 1880s…and you’re looking at them and you’re seeing them how he saw them, and how he saw them is different and beautiful and bright and weird and incredibly sad and a million different things. And it’s that feeling that differentiates them from any and all other still life paintings or pictures of sunflowers, forever.
Beach House has an uncanny ability to do that with our sense of longing and desire. And even as there are innumerable love songs to listen to on an infinity of records, how they do it is simply…different and beautiful and bright and weird and incredibly sad and a million different things.
— Mario Cotto