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Beach House

Teen Dream

Label: Sub Pop

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Baltimore duo Beach House make their debut on Sub Pop with Teen Dream. Its forwards-shift will renew the admiration of fans of their previous two albums – fans among whom Beach House can already count Ed Droste (of Grizzly Bear) and Julian Casablancas (of embarrassing Christmas songs). Starry supporters seem par for the course with Beach House, whose audible clarity of vision seems only to intensify with each release.

Teen Dream  finds Nico-sound-a-like Victoria Legrand more enchanting than ever, her gorgeous, throaty drawl intoning "more, you want more…" on ‘Walk In The Park’ as though no one could ever have asked for less, then suddenly lost, full of air in ‘Used To Be’. Legrand – the French niece of French composer Michel Legrand – sometimes suffered from a waning fidelity to tunefulness on previous releases. Suddenly confident, her vocals now fill Beach House’s music with a richness that crosses decades and continents, and makes this the most rewarding of all their work to date.

Her partner, Alex Scally, nails his colours to the mast here too. Attentiveness to rhythm, where before atmospherics prevailed, lends ‘Mile Stereo’ and the utterly brilliant ‘Norway’ vitality beyond breezy dream-pop, pushing Beach House into a much brighter, eyes-wide state of consciousness. Whether in the emotive, wandering piano arrangements of sparse ‘Real Love’ or the rousing pseudo-classical harpsichord of ‘Take Care’, Teen Dream beats out the dust from their sepia-tinged past, bringing Beach House into 2010 with a directness that will widen their commercial remit beyond the neophytes at Pitchfork HQ.

And well it should. 2010 sees bedroom pop rise to prominence, its sugary melodies set down on four-track recorders and exhaled into the outside world, introverted and wistful. Left out in the cold by the politics of modernism and its crashing economies and corrupt central governments, music is finding oxygen in imagined havens. Band names from the likes of newcomers Summer Camp and Sleep Over invoke the nostalgic comfort of life apart and before the grit of the everyday. Beach House do that too. Only with three albums under their belt, Beach House, suddenly more vital and grown than ever before, will be the band whose outstretched hand you’ll take this year. - Hazel Sheffield