Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark)
The lush indie-pop outfit Beach House is notable for two things: 1) they are a duo; 2) they are from Baltimore. Any shitty four-piece can sound like an orchestra on record, but Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have only a guitar, keyboard and microphones between them, and they use them to write songs in a town best known for its violent crime rate and its hip-hop scenes brand of club music. Legrand sings in a mostly flat, androgynous voice stuck firmly in the middle of the mix; a distant, ethereal tool that makes way for the synth lines and drums loops to share equal space. This puts Beach House squarely in the headphones music category—throw Devotion (or the pairs first, meandering LP) on at a party and youd hear the beat, a pleasant drone and nothing else. Pull on your overheads—
earbuds are so bad for you—and its a whole new world. You catch the tiniest touches, like the brushes on the opener Wedding Bell or the bells-driven bridge between Holy Dances and All the Years, on which Legrand rhymes a bunch of words with the records title. This beautiful bauble of a band is destined to score indie films and cable series finales. And D.A.R.L.I.N.G. will be the last song on countless break-up mixtapes this year. All of this is enough to ensure the pair a pre-Transatlanticism Death Cab-like existence, and that is perfect.
Tara Thorne
categories: Coast pick
This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2008.