 Teen Dream by Beach House -- the talented singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally -- may sound like a thousand things at the same time. The fact that they sound like a mixture of Nico when she was with Velvet Underground, Brian Wilson when he was alone in a studio making the next pop symphony or the numerous 80s duos making skeleton music with Casiotone percussion is missing the point.
Listen to Teen Dream late at night, alone in a warm bed with headphones, in the state between waking and dreaming. This is music as secret hideaway, somewhere between snowfall and summer, bliss and paranoia. Most of all it feels like looking at an old scratched Polaroid of a lost lover, the sheer heartache coming back with full force.
The strategies to the music are clear; the moody instrumentation is usually hazy and dream-like: Simple chord structures, fuzzy guitar tones and thick swathes of organs make up most of the structure, augmented by tiny sounding drum machines. What's stunning about Teen Dream is Legrand's voice and Scally's devotion to it. Her heavy, deep voice is icy yet warm, sultry and big-throated, whispering cryptic stories about falling in love and shouting when its over, while Scally lays down the sparkling landscape that Legrand's voice floats above, just barely.
Among the vocal harmonies of Ohhhs and Ahhs springs out 'Zebra', a slow plaintive repetitive guitar line is meshed with soft organs while Legrand sings in hushed tones and broken sentences about a black and white horse, "You know you go/ You don't gotta worry now honey/Who wastes his child/ Born so wild" as the song ends on a high note and a cymbal crash.
'Silver Soul' is all reverse psychology. Where Scally's guitars slide and buzz to a woozy melody, making us believe that we're either standing in a beautiful church or riding a bicycle on a bright sunny day in a poppy field, Legrand lets her voice shrill to a tale of heartbreak," Gather medicine for heartache/ So we can act a fool/Its incomplete without you/ The silver soul is running through you/ It's a vision/Complete illusion."
'Silver Soul' segues right into 'Norway' and changes the scene. It's a sweet breezy little number with a cascading guitar motif, a floor tom backbeat and bright harmonies with lyrics to spare, as Legrand coos, "Where you thinkin you gotta run to now/ With the beating of a tiny heart?/ Hangs on to the things that you are supposed to say/ Billions of stars that open to your fate."
The loveliest song comes in the middle.
'Walk in the Park is a stunner', with its skeletal structure of Casiotone drumbeats and a one note organ with a lonely guitar in the background, is a stunner, with hypnotic lyrics, with Legrand playing hide and seek with her voice, hushed up in the verses and hitting high notes in the choruses, "The fact that you saw in the door isn't looking at you anymore/ the name that you call in its place isn't waiting for your embrace/ the word that you learned to behold cannot hold you anymore."
While many of the songs tend to be on the dreamy side, their musical structure is repetitive. 'Better Times' with its full bodied guitars, harpsichords and what sounds like an actual drum kit is one of the duo's most elaborate songs and sounds right out of The Cars songbook as Legrand invites us into the shadowy depths of her complex romantic consciousness.
'Take Care' is a merry-go-around waltz with its double-tracked pianos and guitars playing the same key and Legrand's uplifting vocals, she sings clearly here, without affect and produces notes that trail off with uncommon power, not unlike Nico, to whom she's often compared.
Most of the time Teen Dream sounds like it's from another time and place or another planet altogether. Empty spaces and decisively cryptic lyrics are the hallmarks of Teen Dream; none of which promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand and Scally's playing field is a dungeon into which they toss their own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return.
*****Get it NOW!
****Just get it
***Maybe maybe not
**Just download
the best song
*Forget that this was made |
