Beach House Make Their Grandest Statement Yet with Once Twice Melody
Dream-pop pros once again trace the ethereal on sweeping 8th LP
Since 2004, Beach House have been enchanting us. Few artists in the last 20 years have managed to intoxicate their listeners so consistently and skillfully. In a catalog now spanning nearly 100 songs, the duo have very few duds. Maybe that’s because a Beach House song only asks as much of you as you’d like to give. Listen to “Lazuli” passively while lazing in a sunlit room or melt into it free of distractions, but the song will sweep over you either way. Like fog rolling in on a lake, you can see it—touch it, even—but you can’t capture or evade it. And if you tried to describe it to an alien from another planet, you probably wouldn’t get very far.
Released in four “chapters” over the course of a few months (the last of which ties up the whole album on Feb. 18 via Sub Pop), Once Twice Melody again accomplishes this feeling of inevitability. The eighth album from the pair of dream-pop stalwarts (a term that is surely overused, but one that applies here, if anywhere) consisting of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally won’t shock any longtime Beach House listeners. But it will certainly thrill them. From the majestic opening notes of the title track to the last electronic flourish of closer “Modern Love Stories,” Once Twice Melody is the culmination of everything Beach House do best.
Produced entirely by the band, Once Twice Melody often plays like a movie score without the accompanying film, or like the movie itself. From the slinky (“New Romance”) to the spooky (“Masquerade”), the album is engaging, but it also unfolds with little fuss, just like a perfectly executed film. A nameless woman appears throughout, sometimes in search of something (as on the title track), other times content to rest, as on the wispy “Sunset,” in which an acoustic guitar accompanies Legrand as she recites her own lines of poetry to herself: “Sugar on her eyelids, cosmos for the veil … lay me where the flowers grow,” she sings. On “Through Me,” colors and light pervade her words again as she chants, “A time before the time we met / Here lies violet / Who can’t forget what happens next.” Never does a production choice or line, no matter how ambiguous, sound out of place.
Largely recorded at Apple Orchard Studio in the duo’s hometown of Baltimore, Once Twice Melody features 18 songs that vary in speed and style. Each is so distinctly Beach House, but the band take formulas that already worked for them and make them somehow even more effective, namely through the use of a live string ensemble. Songs like the free-flowing “Another Go Around” and the ambient “Over and Over” take on a new kind of roominess.