Beach House — 7 ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 05/17/2018
This is the kind of album that modern day listeners should obsess over. It nails everything that a general modern audience seems to crave, and more importantly it finds a sense of awe and beauty through these very accessible, present day methods. That’s not to say it was consistently magnificent; being called a pure, righteous modern day album has its downsides, as today’s new music in general has seemed to falter quite a bit in producing something that finds true strength and connection from multiple angles that can stand on its own without further labels or context. This album isn’t really an exception to that, but it still finds lots of important successes, and given its strong modern day appeal, it’s certainly worth praise.
As you may have been witnessing, today’s musicians attempting for top shelf market exposure tend to focus heavily on timbre, or at least attempt to. While this band does not have that tunnel vision marketing goal, they completely nail an effective, enthralling, modern sound as the basis for their music here. With this heavy focus, it’s difficult not to get caught up in attempting too many things at once, like finding very unique synthetic sonorities or a specific mood meant for a certain setting, and therefore losing a grasp on what will make this sound attractive and enjoyable. The timbre on this album hardly ever loses sight of that, being a wonderful modern example of something that checks the boxes of being fresh, unique, and emotionally centered, while ultimately finding artistry and beauty in the decisions on sound quality, layering, and space.
There was great dynamic flow in most every song, with important and riveting transitions between guitars and synthesizers highlighting a subtle action packed experience. From the groovy, swirling synth repetition in “Lemon Glow” to the awesome thick texture guitar build in “Dive” to the glossy, spacious electronic atmosphere in “Woo”, this was quite a masterful job in creating an impactful timbre through modern day techniques. The only time the sound lost its magic to me was the overly powerful marimba-like repetition in “Black Car”, which was a bit distracting and didn’t provide a grasping musical idea.
While the overall sound had the main attention and provided most of the music’s legs to stand on, it’s the harmonic motion that truly separates this album from the many others today with similar focus and intent. Most don’t make it over the hump of being simply pleasant at best, but this does thanks to its many creative ideas in harmonic progression. For most of the album, it was mostly just basic care and understanding for harmonic syntax and decorating tonic heavy structures. There were some strong landings on IV and V in repeated phrases, like in “Pay No Mind” and “L’Inconnue”, and some nice borrowed chord usage for transitional purposes throughout. With that, there was also an incredible harmonic highlight, which was the song “Lose Your Smile”. Now that’s the power of a sequential progression, folks, as well as how to mask it through inversions and unclear key before it hits cleanly with root position motion in accordance with the melody. It’s a wonderful journey, and easily one of the best songs I’ve heard of all year.
This leads me to touch on the album’s slight weakness, and how it misses out on greatness to settle as but a very good example of what it does among the modern albums that also have this problem. Melodic lines were a bit too much of a spectator within the musical structure rather than the extra, gravitational force they could have been. This goes back to the general modern struggle of connecting with the listener through every possible angle. This was quite gorgeous in sound, it had interesting and at times magnificent harmonic motion, but didn’t quite layer everything with a single line to slam the emotion home. No matter how much care and attention the sound gets, melody can’t just be brushed aside as something unimportant; everything still has to work together. The melodies here still played a nice role, though, being the humanistic vocal additions to the instrumental bombardment and maintaining a good correspondence with underlying harmony. It simply didn’t have enough personality in shape and organization to add what could have been a clinching factor to greatness.
With this album, though, Beach House shows real promise and a real intent to be considered among the best active musical groups today, already having quite a strong following. Perhaps this may be a peak for them, as their one downfall here would take a lot of musical reprogramming to get to a higher level, but let it be known that this duo is important. They showed a real glimpse of greatness in “Lose Your Smile”, so even though the very best today may be too difficult to catch, they have still made their mark quite well.
