Album Review: Beach House - Thank Your Lucky Stars
Imagine this conversation between two music aficionados:
So there’s a new Beach House record.
Completely forgoing the traditional “album cycle” the
Baltimore based dream pop duo Beach House have already completed and are
releasing the follow up to their just released fifth album. Thank Your Lucky Stars, the group’s
sixth record, arrives with the disclaimer that it is a true follow up—it’s not
a companion record, or a collection of b-sides or outtakes. A press release on
the effort states that the songs were written after the writing sessions for Depression
Cherry but both albums—distinctly different in sound—were recorded at the
same time.
So what we seem to have here is, in a sense, a bit of a Kid A and Amnesiac situation on our hands.
I guess what is most impressive about Thank Your Lucky Stars, has nothing to do with the music itself, but
rather that the band’s label, Sub Pop, managed to keep this under wraps for as
long as they did, considering how early both Depression Cherry and the band’s fourth album Bloom, leaked in advance of their respective releases.
A surprise “new” sixth album from Beach House, hot on the
heels of their fifth album is a lot to take in, and the non-traditional “here’s
our next record” roll out is somewhat jarring, which is something that I took
into my first listen—I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. But upon second
listen, it’s clear that Thank Your Lucky
Stars is certainly not an immediate listen but one that reveals itself to
you over time, if at all.
Sonically, Thank Your
Lucky Stars is a real departure from Depression
Cherry. On that record, while the band scaled back its “big” sound, it was
still operating with a large budget soundscape.
The dynamic on TYLS, however,
harkens back to the band’s earliest, lo-fi days—cheap sounding drum machines
and off kilter, woozy keyboards are the hallmarks here.
But you may say, wait, cheap sounding drum machines and
woozy, off kilter keyboards are the hallmark of every Beach House record. Yes,
yes indeed the band does have that “Beach House sound.” And with Depression Cherry, the band was scaling
back the size of the song while still relying on the slick production values of
their third and fourth records; here, they’ve scaled things back even
further—stripping away the expensive sounding trappings completely. TYLS would not sound out of place as the
follow up to the band’s second album, 2008’s Devotion simply based on the execution of its songwriting and its production
values alone.
Even the cover art also harkens back to the first two records in a sense, with its choice of font, and the weird old photo adding to that lo-fi feeling.
Vocally, frontwoman Victoria Legrand also seems to be
experimenting with some different deliveries here—it’s specifically noticeable
on the opening track, “Majorette,” where she shows incredible restraint—rather
than letting her voice howl through cavernous reverb, it stays very flat and
reserved sounding—as does the rest of the song, honestly. It’s not a bad song,
but it’s a bit of an anticlimactic opening track, and it incorrectly sets the stage
for the rest of the record, which arrives as a bit of a mixed bag of what the
band does, though here, I’m still not sure if they are doing it well.
When I say that TYLS
is not an immediate listen, I mean that not only does it take a few listens
before you are like, “Yeah I fucks with this,” but it also needs a few songs to
get warmed up—not really hitting its stride until the driving fourth track,
“One Thing.”
And even then, as the album slides into its second half,
there is something is holding me back from completely saying, “Yeah I fucks
with this.”
Maybe this is where it truly becomes Beach House’s Kid A and Amnesiac.
Famously released eight months apart, for some reason, I
didn’t like Radiohead’s Amnesiac
right when it came out—it took about four or five more months for me to really
get into it. It’s a dense record; complicated and not really that accessible of
a listen at times—or at least it wasn’t in 2001. And maybe that’s what is
happening here.
Thank Your Lucky Stars
is not a bad record by any means, but there’s some kind of wall around it that
prevents the listener from being welcomed as openly as Beach House has greeted
its audience on previous albums—event as recently as on Depression Cherry. It’s slow burning, and by Beach House standards,
it’s about as slow burning as the director’s cut of a film about molasses
rolling up a hill. It’s missing that energy and life that the band found about
six years ago with Teen Dream, and
managed to hang onto, and even expand upon with Bloom. It has its strong
moments—“One Thing” and “Elegy Into The Void” being the two best put together
of the set, but as a whole, the album leaves more questions than answers in the
end.
Sure it’s swoons in a few places and is hazy throughout, but
with Thank Your Lucky Stars, it seems
that Beach House have finally made its difficult, experimental album.
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