Indie Rock’s hype-to-backlash machine has such an impressively quick turnaround that it’s a wonder Palm Beach, Florida’s native sons Surfer Blood even had a chance to release their debut record. The band quickly gained critical acclaim following an impressive showing at this year’s CMJ festival with a raw, muscular and distinctly noir-ish take on ‘90s indie power pop. Comparisons to Weezer trail the band, but Astro Coast contains so much more than a retread of the Blue Album’s tropes. John Paul Pitts, the band’s singer-guitarist-mastermind has crafted an enduring classic with this record, one of those ten-song shitkickers that’s made to roll on repeat in car stereos at high volume. The guitars land with a propulsive thump on the album’s opener “Floating Vibes” and then proceed to weave delicate little melodies around Pitt’s reverb-soaked vocals. From the towering, fist-pumping crunch of “Swim” to the sparse, delicate dub of “Harmonix,” Surfer Blood is not afraid to let the guitars do the talking. Every song on Astro Coast contains a memorable riff, the kind that will have you have you whistling at inopportune moments throughout your day. “Take it Easy” layers agile percussive guitars over skittering Afro-pop rhythms to create a dance floor anthem with an undercurrent of darkness that seems to pervade even Astro Coast’s most bombastic pop hits. Dirgelike “Slow Jabroni” serves as the apex of this depression, the soundtrack to a 3am realization that everything has gone slowly, horribly awry. Astro Coast stands as one of the more promising debuts in recent memory.
What does it mean for young people to make old-time music? This question is unavoidable in a discussion of an album like this one, but I don’t have a clear answer. Is it dishonest for educated young people to sing songs about working all day and not being able to read? Is it objectionable to be nostalgic for an idealized period of time in which you never lived, or is that form of escapism harmless? Is this music aesthetically meaningful or is it just kitsch? All of these issues come to the foreground during “Hit ‘Em Up Style,” an old-fashioned cover of a one-hit trash song from 2001. The Drops have arranged the song for fiddle, banjo and beatbox, creating what could either be seen as a fusion of old and new styles or a lack of imagination in reenvisioning the song, and though Rhiannon Giddens sings with power and passion, the source material is shitty and stupid. It’s an awesome novelty, but novelty is all it is.
Ethical issues aside, the Drops fare better when they stick to old-time covers. “Don’t Get Trouble In Your Mind” in particular is a fun track, the youth of the players lending it the energy it needs to succeed. This is maybe the best understanding of the record: young people playing music they love with the energy it deserves. But when they stray from their subgenre the results are subpar: “Reynadine” is a real wincer, Tom Waits’ “Trampled Rose” is better left alone, and the only original song on the record, “Kissin’ and Cussin’,” differs greatly from the rest of the album in mood and instrumentation, in addition to not being very good.
For the purpose of discussing music, we almost prefer an average musical experience to a great one because of what happens when something is so great: there’s nothing to be said. If we heard some average music, we might have criticized which of its flaws stuck with us the most. We may each have different flaws to note or perhaps one of us would have found it unremarkable enough to nod ‘yes’ through the others’ critique and we would soon be discussing other concerns that affect us more deeply.
But when music is truly great, we are left still in our words. We could talk about, but it would amount to simple praises that would do no respect to the music. So why is it so difficult to discuss great music? It is not, after all, that we are unversed on the subject matter. It is because we were so forcibly possessed by those sounds that words seem unfit to address the experience.
Of course, great music is a language itself—a language of (pure) subjectivity—so, while great music may not be proliferate in the world to any individual’s mind, one may very well meet a person who is moved by his or her own conception of great music regularly. One notices the effect this music has in another’s speech and writing.
In speech, praise can take many forms: stuttering, endless sentences, surprisingly succinct utterances (e.g. “Love it”), grand gesturing, or fluxes in the speed of the delivered verse. In writing, it might take form of some incredible analogy. Often the writer will keep his or her reverence in check and attempt to describe those aspects of the music that were so phenomenal: How the sound was very tight (i.e. fitting to itself), how all the beats seemed to come at the exact moment; tuned to what we might call our being or spirit, the soundness of the structure or execution of it, the sound was well-balanced across the range, et cetra.
Might the difficulty of articulating something beyond these value judgments be a result of the poverty of human language? Or maybe our relatively weak command of this language? There are surely plenty of individuals who are particularly gifted and entertaining to discuss music with, so to say we have weak command might be a bit dramatizing. Even these fluent individuals, though, cannot recreate the intense and deeply-rooted feeling we gain when we encounter great music. It may be necessary to turn to the other arts to speak to the profundity of music. This turning itself is strange—is discourse itself not an art?
Writing and speaking and communicating in general are art forms that can be practiced and mastered—yet they continually speak superficially to the effect of music. Are there some art forms that speak to us more thoroughly? Can a painting, words formed into a poem, a theatrical performance or a drawing approach speaking to the laudability of music? Or would these too prove to be insufficient in communicating our experience? It may be that music speaks to something deeper and beyond human phenomenal experience.
This is consistent with the idea suggested by Schopenhauer that music is inherently nonrepresentational and stands out from other arts in this regard; even if music does have a physical representation (the collision of air molecules) it does not explicitly relate to any physical object. We may argue that we can learn to associate a note or sound with something in the real world, as we do with any language. One might counter that this symbolism in music is not as explicit or concrete as in a constructed language or physical work of art.
Thus, as Schopenhauer might say, we can use the non-representationality of music to escape the representational world or speak to the underlying reality of these objects (Schopenhauer’s Will). In this context, we would say language cannot adhere to music because it speaks to us on a different level. Good music is something that speaks effectively to the real world (the world beyond objects). This idea appears to be in conflict with itself: music both speaks to and provides relief from the underlying reality of the world or the Will. The paradox is relieved somewhat if we understand Schopenhauer’s Will not as some unknowable noumena, or things in themselves, but as experiencing the world beyond objects through ourselves and our all-too-human drives (according to Schopenhauer, primarily through the drive to live and reproduce).
Authors and philosophers have long spoken to the bounds of music and language — namely the terms by which the limits of language are defined. Nietzsche describes some of his early thoughts on music in terms of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, each representing, respectively, a sort of structure or semblance; and an intoxication and limitlessness. Nietzsche says “music struggles to inform us about its nature in Apolline images; if we now reflect that music, raised to its highest power . . . it must seem possible that music also knows how to find symbolic expression for its true Dionysian wisdom” (The Birth of Tragedy).
This means that while music can maintain itself in a non-representational and free and transcendental (Dionysian) world, it struggles to speak to the structured, representational (Apolline) world. Nietzsche further exemplified his analogy with Greek practices in theatre-going: the time when the masses came to disband their idea of the individual and join the masses in worship of Dionysus and the universal.
Music can become representational, as can any other language, but it is perhaps some underlying power of music to attach itself to something more profound—the Universal or core part of being—that makes it difficult to speak of in words within structure and convention. No matter how far we push music into an intellectualized process or a social pact, subjectivity will rule and we will continue to speak to this ‘universal’ idea within us all and retire to our comparably weak exclamations.
The section editor, drunken and reeling, clots of spittle and half-chewed food hanging in his beard like butterfly pupas, pulls two rusty and unsolicited pennies from his pocket and throws them in Eric’s face:
It is completely impossible to describe a work of art meaningfully—be it music, film, literature, or work in any other medium. There are only three legitimate uses of the ostensible description of individual works of art:
1) To evaluate the work in relation to the reader’s assumed aesthetic interests; to let a reader know if it is a thing they might want to check out or a thing they shouldn’t waste their time on. This is accomplished by a good review.
2) To clarify something about the work for someone who already has experience with it; to focus somebody’s thoughts on a particular characteristic or quality of a work they’re familiar with. This is accomplished by a good piece of criticism.
3) To describe a personal aesthetic experience derived from a work, disguised as a description of it. This is accomplished by a good literary description of a piece of art.
None of these can properly be said to be meaningful description of the work itself: the first is about the reader’s presumed values; the second takes familiarity with the work for granted; the third is about the writer’s personal experience. In none of them is the actual substance of the work evoked.
Phantogram
This duo has been garnering a tremendous amount of buzz around the blog circuit, gaining accolades for their infusion of standard hip-hop beats and the angelic croon of lead singer Sarah Barthel. If you were in a Starbucks within the past month, they were the download of the week, they just signed to the esteemed labels, Barsuk and Ghostly International (Ra Ra Riot, Menomena, Mates of State, School of Seven Bells), and they’ll be at South by Southwest this March in Austin to support their debut album, “Eyelid Movies,” which has already been designated an NPR focus of the week. They’re from Saratoga Springs, New York, and they recorded their beautifully produced EP in a barn. Radio K is a big fan; they played at our CMJ (College Music Journal) broadcast in New York City and snatched the #8 spot on our annual Top 77 albums of the year.
Small Black
Information about this Brooklyn duo is scarce, but they have been profiled by Pitchfork, Stereogum, and a slew of other websites, especially when Washed Out (touring with Beach House this spring) remixed their gorgeous single, “Despicable Dogs.” Originally known as Slowlands, the band disbanded and then promptly reassembled themselves under their current moniker. Their tunes are filled with ethereal background noise, spacey vocals and shoegazy melodies that take complete hold of the listener. There really isn’t a way to describe what Small Black sounds like. It’s just really great.
A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Let me first admit, in case my subsequent fawning becomes too much, that this band produced my favorite album of last year and one of my most treasured listening experiences. If you haven’t heard of the Philadelphia band A Sunny Day in Glasgow, you aren’t the only one. Only two albums into their career over the span of three years, this group has flown under the radar for quite some time, but their sophomore album, “Ashes Grammar,” was one of the best reviewed albums of 2009. Suffering from severe line-up changes, the band never expected to create what many regard as a landmark album for dream pop, and over the span of 23 tracks, ranging from 15 seconds to 6 ½ minutes, it totally baffles you how this many layers of music can come together so seamlessly. Incoherent lyrics shimmer through dense layers of instrumentation and huge, striking beats, and each song is a completely different experience and idea. Expect big things from these guys; even after a few months since the release of “Ashes Grammar,” their last.FM wall has exploded with a daily stream of listener praise. If you are interested, check out the session they did at Radio K back in November at the “In-Studios” tab at radiok.org.
Frosted tree tips just outside the city, products of last night’s sleet barrage, greet me on yet another beautiful Minneapolis morning. Except this time, the frozen white fingertips of the tree line, stretching heavenward, are ushering me out of the metropolis and into the great northern realms of the state. Besides being drenched in freezing rain the prior evening, Minneapolis experienced a different blow of the cold kind—another talented young band forced to hang up their hats and call it a day.
The band I’m referring to is a little-known hardcore group called Cowards. Somehow, after witnessing their “last” set at the Beat Coffeehouse and being totally blown out of my gourd by their original brand of prog-infused hardcore punk, I’ve scored a ride up to Duluth with the bassist to check out their true final gig as a band. This is going to be the good one I’m told.
As we coast past completely whited-out scenes of forest pines, the soundtrack of our little road trip takes a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn—the washed-out percussion of the first track of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” pours out the speaker to my left. It is only then that I remember the original prompt that I was given for this article: “why file sharing is wrong.” A bold statement that screw-you-music-industry-we’re-letting-the-consumer-decide masters Radiohead might find laughable. So, you might be able to sympathize with me on why that little doozy had slipped my mind. I love file sharing. Everyone loves file sharing. FREE CONTENT, get your FREE CONTENT right here, all day, every day, on the beautiful new age invention we have embraced called the Internet.
For bands like Cowards, however, free content is not the prettiest combination of two words in the English language. What most people would call “free content”—a self-released four song EP entitled Solitude—that can be mindlessly obtained with a few clicks, is in reality made up of the blood and sweat of three hardworking artists who happen to share the name Kyle.
Yes, file sharing is an amazing tool for small unknown bands to build a fan base by giving away their content. Megastars such as Radiohead also don’t have to worry about file sharing affecting their net worth too much either—they’ve proved that their following is willing to donate a hefty chunk of change. It is the bands stuck in between these two opposite poles of notoriety whose livelihood is essentially ransacked by the Internet pirate.
In an age that saw the major record label keel over and reveal its slowly dying overstuffed abdomen of commercial pap, the music lover was treated to a rapid rise in independent artists willing to create art that challenged their listeners. With Pitchfork and Pandora, we now have more music than our iPods or wallets can possibly handle. That being said, we do not live in a whimsical socialist state that supports the arts. The only way in which musicians will be able to continue to create that original “content” is if the individual consumer throws some bones their way.
Cowards’ last show was held in the basement of Kyle’s (guitar) parents house in Duluth. Nestled shoulder to shoulder in a dingy basement, circle pit included, with almost 70 kids of varying ages and dress was an inspiring and humbling experience. Cowards finished their set, and I realized I had witnessed one of the most energetic and amazing live shows of my life.
For a completely D.I.Y. produced show, the band accepted a good amount of donations as cover. Kids are still willing to pay to see punk rock. Leaving Duluth with this firsthand renewal of faith, I felt that Minneapolis might just feel a little bit warmer upon my return.
It may simply be my aversion to any discussion of morality that marks my distaste for The Machinist. It could also be the high hopes I had for its’ seemingly intricate and inquisitive plotline. Even until the end, despite the better part of my ego telling me precisely what the protagonist’s reality was, I refused to accept the obviousness of the resolution. I was set on a conclusion that I still couldn’t decipher—something I was waiting for the film to show me. Instead the film gives an overdone facsimile of the psychology of guilt, one that questions both the continuity of experience and the ability of the mind to harbor illness.
If I were to concern myself primarily with what The Machinist contemplates, in regard to morality, I would ask myself: is the guilt experienced by the protagonist, Trevor Reznik, a guilt birthed in fear or compassion? Unfortunately, I think it is the former—another idea that repels any preference for the film. The constant depiction of restrictions on life—the hostile workplace, Trevor’s materialistic notes (“Buy more bleach”), paying for sex, portrayal of a faulty police state—tell me perhaps there is nothing more than fear to Trevor’s delirium. Where is the humanity?
The subject matter is not the basis for all my dislike of the film. Perhaps both actors and writers are to blame for several careless, poorly-delivered lines sprinkled through the film. These lines took me from the cinematic moment and continuity that The Machinist requires to get across the relatively lackluster imagery. If the viewer is pulled from the harsh blues that the film is predominately shot in, the few scenes that do not immediately depict these tones (they’re outside, usually on suburban tree-lined streets) lose their effect.
Deniz Rudin
The thing that is the strangest about looking at a person whose skin is stretched so tight around their head that it is basically like looking at a skull is the bits of a human face that are not made of bones: the nose and the ears. Imagine a skull with a nose and ears. It’s eerie.
The brain pan curving up out of the back of the neck, arms like a snowman’s arms and legs long and sharp, the ribcage like lungs, spine running up the back like a lizard’s, like a stegosaur, and from it sprout shoulderblades like wings. Tiny bird’s bones. The uppermost tips of the pelvis clearly visible above the waistline of the pants. And the way it moves: this thing you’re used to seeing held up by a plastic stand in the science classroom moving under its will, like in a video game. The cheeks like big flat blades. This bizarre, otherworldly machinery somewhere down inside most people shown as clearly as it can be shown on a living person.
The body is obviously the star here and if Christian Bale would just keep his mouth shut and let the camera stay silently on him like a fly on a sideshow freak we might have a decent short film on our hands. If only his palms were thin and his fingers long and skinny, his hands like daddy longlegs.
But it is wrong to place the blame on Bale, for he was given words to speak and he did them justice. Though the film claims a Dostoyevsky novella as its main inspiration, the truth is that it borrows so heavily from Fight Club that a convincing plagiarism case could be made, and compared to either piece of source material it is poorly written and constructed, downright idiotic. And though the direction and cinematography are decent and at times better than decent, I feel like the director should not get off without punishment; he chose to shoot this script.
This movie is a passing well-shot work of dimestore existentialism and hollywood surrealism that succeeds only briefly in disguising its essential triteness, and its ending retroactively unravels anything that might have been interesting about what went before.
And the fucking music:
They tried to soundtrack “bleak” with oboes.
Remember Kel Mitchell? That funny bastard who loved orange soda on all of those Nickelodeon shows in the 90s? “Kenan & Kel”? “All That”? “Good Burger”? What the fuck ever happened to that guy? Answer: He’s gone off the proverbial deep end and has begun a new life of making bizarre YouTube skits. This is genuinely crazy stuff, folks. It’s like he’s been on a different planet for the last ten years and the only thing he brought back with him was a batshit sense of humor. Watch the breakdown commence on his YouTube channel:
I asked as many people as possible to review the same album for this issue. My idea was to showcase the essential and inescapable subjectivity of criticism, and to that end I chose a challenging record: The Purging Trilogy, a two-hour-long avant-guitar album by guitarist Mick Barr. The record is split into three parts: Ixoltion, Sacreth, and Hymns. As I expected, every assertion put forth in one of these reviews is contradicted in another, and above all every reviewer displayed their personal style of criticism.
Pete Noteboom
It’s a massive translucent pirate ship filled with damned souls holding scimitars cutting through the clouds. It’s a gigantic zeppelin exploding in mid-air amid a hail of flaming comets. It’s a young boy watching from the mountains with mouth agape as extraterrestrials decimate his small village with huge futuristic laser beams. It’s the dark matter that holds universes together. It’s high, high above you. It’s exhilarating electric narcolepsy. It’s a new kind of Raga. It’s long, it’s challenging, it’s natural. It’s guitars!!!!!!!!!
Smudge
Mick Barr’s solo effort under the name Ocrilim is almost two and a half hours of mediocre musicianship, slow and self-indulgent guitar noodling, and redundant harmonies. The whole thing reminds me of the posthumous J Dilla record Donuts in that it sounds like pages haphazardly ripped out of a musician’s sketchbook; no song sounds complete. I can only think that the title of this record comes from the feeling Barr got when he finally vomited out all of the musical refuse deep in his gut. The Purging Trilogy isn’t abrasive enough to be noise rock or desolate enough to be drone or doom metal; this is an interlude in background noise.
Andrew Bergstrom
I was very impressed by The Purging Trilogy, a composition from the mind of Mick Barr. Multilayered tracks of guitar grind and shred a wordless tale; the more-than-two-hour-long trilogy sounds like an opera for guitar, and Barr’s insane speed and somewhat spastic playing style evoke the stage performance of Paganini, who played as though possessed. Though it may be difficult to appreciate on the first listen, the album is wonderfully executed, epic and welcome push on the boundaries of music and of art.
Kevin Tully
The set-up of this set of records is simple: it’s basically 2 hours and 12 minutes of one dude playing guitar. Now, I’m totally in awe of anyone that can see a project of that magnitude to completion—that’s fucking impressive, I don’t care what you’re into—but is appreciating this behemoth the same as enjoying it? I understand why people like heavy-handed experimental musicians like Ocrilim, and if this sort of music is your thing then you’re gonna love The Purging Trilogy. It’s just not my thing. I’m not asking for the two hours of my life I spent listening to it back, I’m just saying that I probably wouldn’t do it again.
Angela Sanders
For an album that is over two hours long, not a whole lot happens. The Purging Trilogy is a huge undertaking for the listener, and while I can appreciate Barr’s technical skills as a guitarist, I cannot help but be dissatisfied with the product as a whole. “Ixoltion” and “Sacreth” have a constant drone in the background and not much layered on top of it. “Hymns” had some variety, but the technical aspect had lost its intrigue and I felt like I was listening to my life just hum by. Music should be more engaging than that.
Eric Brew
The Purging Trilogy is like eating processed, organic sugar straight from the packaging. It’s difficult to put into words: it’s absurdly satisfying as it’s being consumed, but in retrospect you realize you probably shouldn’t have eaten it; your tastebuds are shocked. Everything will taste flat for a while. Mick Barr’s sense of timing is incredible, and the depth of his compositions calls for every listener’s veneration of his talent. The structure can also be overwhelming if you pay too close attention. It can feel over-processed, as if Barr were a supercomputer calculating his next lick according to data pulled from an impressionist painting. Barr is obsessed with pattern and arrangement that can be too redolent of sugar and salt crystals at times.
Sam Johnston
In the time it takes to listen to The Purging Trilogy I can listen to “Bad Romance” 27 times, but fate has other plans for me. With the first searing chord of “Ixolition” the walls of my house are blown down and there before me hovers, impossibly, Ocrilim himself, illuminated only by a thousand orbs of mythical energy floating upward against the pull of gravity. He reaches toward me and issues a single command, “Take my hand, slave, and let us be free.” I have no choice but to comply.
Zach McCormick
These songs, while all virtuosic and technical and lofty, aren’t that engaging. Great playing simply does not equal a great album, and this record will only appeal to diehard genre fans, who will probably love it because it’s a masterpiece. Everyone else is going to run in horror away from the mental sandpaper that is layer upon layer of buzzing, treble-heavy guitar constantly switching tempo. If Rachmaninov had been raised in a stoner metal band, this is probably what he would have come up with.
Natalie Heath
If I were to make a movie about a cat trying to escape from a paper bag that has been set on a conveyor belt inching toward some sort of giant smashing device, I would choose Ocrilim’s Purging Trilogy as the soundtrack. And this is no ordinary cat on its way to certain death; this is like the greatest cat, you love this cat, and you care deeply that it escapes. The intensity and scratchiness of Ocrilim’s like 200 guitars would provide the perfect musical narrative for my gruesome cat death movie: the movement of the guitars would correspond to the wild movements of the cat and the whole thing would probably say something really profound about the futility of struggle; I mean, this paper bag is really thick and cats aren’t that strong.
Sage Dahlen
This album could be described as a soundtrack to a torrential rainstorm, or a migraine headache. It’s long, full of self-indulgent, unremarkable noodling with some badass grunge and metal riffs interspersed. (I’ll save you some time: the best track is part 3 of “Sacreth.”) The Trilogy, however, is not long in an I-want-my-life-back way, because it never fully holds your attention. You can troll around on the Internet or make dinner while Mick Barr twiddles his fingers over guitar strings.
Peter Starkebaum
It all starts with a pain-bearing, angst-spiked guitar. In this horror there is an attraction; the notes feel sensitive and bare, like an open nerve being sliced. A sense of relief comes in Sacreth when the percussion grounds the relentless shredding; the album’s chaotic mood finds stability. And then come the hymns like a ghostly reflection of the first two segments, ending the album with a feeling of completeness and distinct direction. The Purging Trilogy provokes perspective and true emotion, but if someone asked me if I enjoyed it, I would have to say that it was like picking a scab: it took some cold shivers and necessary pain to get in to the warm, sensitive and bloody.
Michael Hessel-Mial
I am a tourist. I went to one of those steakhouses where you eat a 64-ounce steak and get a free shirt. I thought it would be easy. Instead, I ate about four ounces and passed out next to the baked potato. That’s how I feel about this album; it’s too damn long. But delicious.
Deniz Rudin
At its best The Purging Trilogy is stark and mythic, gigantic and cold. If you distilled all the high points of the record—the longing of the opening riff of “Sacreth 4”, the meditative grief of the first two perfect hymns, the ecstatic triumph of the melodic sections of “Ixoltion 1”—into one hour-long thing, it would be an absolutely incredible album, but for every piece of the record that I love, there is a corresponding misstep. Mick Barr is possessed of genius, but like most prolific artists he is undiscerning; he churns out two and a half hours of music and in it are both masterstrokes and mediocrities, often within the same song. In The Purging Trilogy Barr shows his potential to craft emotionally affecting music, but he hasn’t figured it out quite yet.
We probably should’ve seen this coming: Beach House’s musical development has floated along much like one of their songs. Beginning beautifully but a bit obscured by the haze, the band’s intentions cleared up on their second album, Devotion, paralleling the intoxicating, mysterious melodies that gradually seep into their songs. With Teen Dream, the band’s third and latest album, we see this song blossom into a chorus more gorgeous and entrancing than could have been imagined at its humble beginning.
Beach House loses nothing and gains much on Teen Dream, their debut on Sub Pop. Still present are the lush organs that have defined the band, but they’re brighter this time around. Readily identifiable are Victoria Legrand’s thick vocals, but here they sound more confident, with traces of Stevie Nicks wandering in and out. Beach House are certainly sticking to what they have done in the past, but this album is far more consistent and accessible than either of their previous efforts.
The duo are masters of managing space. Occasionally recalling the auditory parsimony championed by upstarts The xx, Beach House are also not afraid to pile on the layers. “Silver Soul” begins with a riff Sleater-Kinney would have written if Lil Wayne gave them access to his cough syrup stash, and the band adds plodding drums and distorted synth underneath to provide some snug accompaniment. Then, in the first indisputable sign that this album is going to be something special, Legrand repeatedly sings, “It is happening again,” until the song’s conclusion, complemented by crisp “ah ahhs” in the background.
Beach House? Pop? Oh yeah.
Come to think of it, all these new “chillwave” kids on the block could take a lesson from Teen Dream. The whole record is a proclamation that subtle songs can also be triumphant. Whereas Beach House has spent most of their efforts trafficking in ambience up to this point, Teen Dream takes a half step forward, especially as Legrand’s often androgynous voice rises to the forefront toward the conclusion of several songs.
The standout track, if that can be said of a record that exhibits no apparent weaknesses, is “Walk In The Park.” In stark contrast to “Gila,” the best song off of Devotion, “Walk In The Park” shows no hesitation to engage the listener. It’s flooded with nostalgia, from the constant organ to the simple, cheap drums. But instead of letting the sentiment wash over you, Legrand steps into the most engaging melody on the album in the chorus, conceding, “In a matter of time/It would slip from my mind/In and out of my life/You would slip from my mind.” Whether it’s the hard “t” in “matter” or the fact that Legrand finally gives herself the space to sound anthemic, it’s startling to hear Beach House making music this direct.
The Aughts hurled more hyperbole at us than anyone could have asked for, and I hesitate to sully our new decade with more of the same. But what the hell: I think we’ve got a masterpiece on our hands.
Eric Brew
