WARNING – ULTIMATE CHEESE AHEAD ON THESE DESCRIPTIONS:
Beach House has long been a group, if not THE group that is the most intertwined with the relationship between my partner and I. There are so many memories and feelings attached to these songs that they’ve been permanently marked, even the ones I would binge and fantasize to in high school. So be warned, I realize that Beach House is a massively popular band, but damn do these songs mean a lot to me. Also I don’t got no editor on my own personal blog so heh hehhhh get ready for pure, unfiltered WARM VISIONS, BABY!
A few weeks ago I saw Beach House live for the fourth time. It was a wholly unsatisfying show at Brooklyn’s biggest club venue. The crowd around me seemed uninterested in the music. There was a couple grinding. There was a couple yelling at his girlfriend to “be quiet and take a xanax”. I felt physically and emotionally removed from the music. They didn’t even play anything off Devotion. It got me thinking about the past ten years and how this band has really been a constant presence in my life, and how their massive influence may be a chapter that’s ending. I’m assuming that this concert just has me pessimistic about the whole thing and I’ll easily jump back into their euphoria soon enough, but I wanted to look back at how Beach House has somehow seamlessly narrated my late teens and early/mid-20s almost seamlessly through their albums.
The first time I saw them was when they opened for Grizzly Bear at the Michigan Theater in the fall of 2009. I didn’t know them at the time, but they’d very quickly blossom into one of my favorite bands of the decade thanks to their third album Teen Dream. It came at the perfect time for me – 2010 was a magical year in terms of “getting into” indie rock & underground music in general, with new albums from Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem and Yeasayer right at the start of the year. 2009/2010 was, after all, the “year indie broke” as many say. With sufficient hype around the record, along with my overly romantic teen sensibilities (knowing I was going to be leaving my home state and having to make new friends, finding extra sentimentality in mundane things), Beach House was handily able to enhance everyday feelings and scenarios into hazy bliss with their dense, wide-lens version of dream pop. I saw them later that year at Pitchfork Fest and ranked Teen Dream as my second-favorite record of 2010.
Cut to 2012 with Bloom, another very pivotal point in my life. Just started going steady with someone in college. Butterflies, romance and all that. This period helped me reconnect with Devotion as all Beach House music was just so directly associated with the positive feelings that came from being in a budding relationship. This leads into 2015’s Depression Cherry, somehow coming at the perfect time when my partner and I were about to embark on our time being long distance. She was moving to Paris, and I was living at home & working in NYC. Before she left we saw them together in New Haven in what was one of the most magical shows I’d ever been to. The setlist was perfect, I cried a bunch, the light show was great. BH quickly followed with Thank Your Lucky Stars, an album that continues to be ambiguous for me. Did this burn me out? To this day I can’t remember a single melody from this album. I’m sure in a bit I’ll find some meaning behind it. Then we’re here in the present day with 2018’s 7, an album that got massive amounts of blog hype, but really did not connect with me. It matched the darker moods that I had been experiencing lately, but it wasn’t the Beach House I wanted, I guess.
One thing to know to simplify this list: at the basic, nearly atomic level, there are two kinds of Beach House songs: the epic kinds and the syrupy kinds. Do they overlap? Of course, but like I said – epic and syrupy. That’s what you need to know. Beach House’s first two records, Beach House and Devotion primarily engage in the syrupy kind. Slow, oozing songs that can barely keep their eyes open. Are they bored? Are they tired? Are they so overcome with emotion it’s hard for them to cope with reality? That’s for you to decide. It’s not until Teen Dream in 2010 where they either have the budget or the songwriting ambition to make the overwhelming, blissful, arena-pleasers that the epic songs are.
You can hear the embryonic stages of “epic” songs on Devotion like “Wedding Bell” and “Heart of Chambers” – any tune where the tempo picks up and the gorgeous vocals of Victoria Legrand start doing some melodic gymnastics. Now we look at their most recent record, 7, which is almost entirely comprised of epic songs (that feel syrupy yet unsatisfying to me). Gotta please the festival crowds these days! Also a good indication of deciphering a Beach House song – does it have almost excessive cymbals? Hell yeah brother you’ve got an epic, anthemic song on your hands. Always pay attention to the cymbals, people!
READ MORE to see my 10 favorite Beach House songs!
