 No band worth their salt has ever willingly described their work as wallpaper music, and Beach House - this reviewer imagines - would prove no different. The dream-pop duo (made up of Alex Scally and Victoria LeGrand) has been a cult favourite since its emergence on a Pitchfork mixtape in 2006, and in their interviews since the Beach House partners certainly haven't seemed like your average peddlars of dinner party soundtrack mush.
Nonetheless their debut (self-titled) LP sometimes veered sadly close to being so, with truly mouthwatering melodies and tantalising lyrics all too often failing to stride out and meet their initial promise. You listen to their follow-up album, Devotion, with a hope that this time things might work out just a little differently.
First track Wedding Bells soars like a kite on swarming seaside winds, Victoria Legrand's delicate vocal hinting at the '60s and '70s psychedelia of The Beatles and their friend and devotee, Harry Nilsson. Indeed, with its whimsical organ trills and lilting rhythms counterbalanced by guitars that one moment foghorn and the next sigh with Hawaiian romance, the track wouldn't sound out of place on Nilsson's wondrous 1971 LP The Point.
Second track You Came to Me doesn't hold the attention quite so intently. It's similarly soft and swoonsome in approach, but the melodic course it takes is darker and the brightness of the organ begins to seem more workaday. It's as though the duo are taking their sound to a song rather than letting the song lead them to its sound - which isn't to say it's a dud track. This being Beach House, it retains the subtle glow and mournful magic they've made their own. Rhythmically and atmospherically however, it edges towards more sedate and unremarkable territory.
The same might be said of much of the album. Tracks like Gila, Turtle Island and Some Things Last (A Long Time) are all nice songs. Good songs. And more evocative than whole albums of material by lesser talents. But they're evocative, melodically at least, in pretty much the same way. And the lyrics, while in no sense incongruous or trite, aren't so crystalline in their complexity, clarity and construction as to supply a great many nuances of feeling themselves.
There are other high points besides the lovely opener though. The hushabye stomp of Holy Dances pulls the imagination once again towards toy-town visions, equal parts nostalgic and eerie, while Heart of Chambers takes that dead wedding march tempo, marries it to Beatlesy guitar curls and garlands the whole thing with vocals that rise and fall and ruffle like a sash in the wind. The song's latter half doesn't quite fulfil the promise of the former, but it remains an exercise in restrained, elegant grandiosity.
Astronaut and D.A.R.L.I.N.G each fall between the two fences: the ethereal, nautical guitar lines daring to look to the stars, the vocal melodies following suit - but the rhythms stubborn and steadfast in their desire to plod through your heart at one (by now very familiar) pace. Even the album closer, Home Again, doesn't do much to spark new fires before the final chord is struck.
In many ways however, this remains a great record. The shapes it throws are often intriguing, the textures absorbing, the melodic motifs and vocals sometimes wonderful. But when you take pretty shapes and great textures and make them repetitive, motionless... Well, you have wallpaper, basically.
So, not a massive disappointment, but a notable one: and only because this band can do better. The first track here is so stunning that its shadow runs long over all that follows. Perhaps long enough to point a way forward for Beach House. Two such obviously talented and sensitive people can't truly live their lives in just one mood, just one moment. Neither can anyone else. Dream-pop this may be, but dreams are infinitely mellifluous things - that's what makes them so beautiful. Let's hope the next album Beach House album reflects that truth more completely than does this one.
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