Teenage Kicks Joy Darkness
The difference between Teen Dream and Beach House’s two prior albums is night and day. Both figuratively, and, um, a different kind of figuratively. Their third LP stands starkly opposed to its predecessors: forsaking the foggy insularity of lo-fidelity for a bold, bright, sharply-produced sound that makes for brilliant use of dynamics. Interpretively, the grand change in sound has coloured the aesthetic perception: the languorous, melting, opiate haze of past records summoned summer days thick with humidity, but, now, the stark, defined, crystalline palette sounds like night-time, with its high contrast between bright lights and whole blacks.
If this is a Beach House by night, removed from the warm, well-worn laziness of bliss-out, then it’s no surprise that Teen Dream oscillates between sexy and spooky. On “Silver Soul,” which vocalist Victoria Legrand talks up as a “very sexual song,” massive lashings of slide-guitar ride on cresting organ chords and choral vocals of suggestive “oohs”, with the sometimes-somnolent belting out an “it’s happening again!” refrain as if in the throes of, well, something entirely suggestive.
The flipside comes (so to speak) with, curiously enough, the track “Real Love.” Over solemn piano and metronomic pulse of programmed drums, Legrand summons up a spectral dread in language that, were it not for her dark and desperate delivery, could sound silly: “there’s someone in that room/that frightens you when they go ‘boo!’/Boo! Boo! Boo!/etc.”
Upward Nobility
As befitting a more night-time set, a faint chill runs throughout Teen Dream’s tunes; even if it’s just from the precious, delicate grandeur of the album's sparkling production. Where 2006’s self-titled set and 2008’s Devotion went for the foggy and muggy, creating a curled-up intimacy in its insular haze, this LP sounds like a band reaching out, striving forward, building upwards.
“Walk in the Park” is the LP’s colossus: a towering construction of considerable grandeur, in which producer Chris Coady builds an impressively architectural sound. Coady may have cut his teeth as an understudy of Dave Sitek, but he’s not building countless layers of detail-flecking multi-tracking. There’s no extra elements here —it’s still just organ, drumbeats, guitar, and voice— but things sound monstrous; Alex Scally’s guitar ricocheting from speaker to speaker like a single ray of light defracted into a thousand pinpricks; Legrand’s voice filling out the sound like she’s singing into a well.
It’s a dynamic-sounding song at the center of a dynamic-sounding record. Listening to Teen Dream, in all its grandeur, it’s hard not to get the sense that this impressive sounding record will be the one to take Beach House from small stages to big, from the underground to the overground, from band who supported Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear to a band operating on the same scale.
Record Label: Sub Pop
Release Date: January 26, 2010
