Last summer, Volkswagen approached Beach House to use their song “Take Care” in a car commercial; when Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand refused, the company went ahead and commissioned its own version, “Whispers & Stories”. It sounded so much like “Take Care” that viewers assumed they were listening to a Beach House song. After Volkswagen claimed no connection between the two and the band decided not to pursue litigation, the incident passed with no more than a few think-piece ripples. Around that same time, however, Los Angeles musicians and new couple Amber Quintero and Mike Edge were road-tripping across the country, an experience that inspired another Beach House facsimile: their self-titled debut as Boardwalk.
With buzzing organs, languid guitars, Quintero's breathy murmur, and BPMs consistently between 80 and 100, Boardwalk's similarity to Bloom and/or Teen Dream is hard to avoid. It's almost odd that Beach House doesn't appear once in Boardwalk’s list of influences, which includes the Beatles, Brian Eno, and the Velvet Underground, suggesting that any similarity must be the result of musical convergent evolution. Even if Boardwalk were as isolated during the recording process as they claim, and confined to classic rock and golden oldies stations while on the road before that, Beach House has been making music for nearly a decade. Even the band's name points to the influence.
All of which is not to say the record isn't fine to listen to. Edge–who built the equipment with which Boardwalk recorded Boardwalk–trades in rambling riffs with a subtle Laurel Canyon vibe, lending a pleasantly tossed-off quality to opener "I'm Not Myself" and a rumbling texture to "Keep the Wolf". "It's Over" hints at Quintero's Hope Sandoval potential as her voice smoothly shifts gears across her solid, if limited, range. But "High Water" (and, for that matter, "What's Love" and "Oh Well") is Boardwalk's "Whispers & Stories": if you heard the song without knowing the artist behind it, the all-too-familiar chord progressions and tambourine shakes is at best kind of a rip-off, at worst misleading.
Boardwalk falls into the uncanny valley between artists that sound just enough like what we already know and love and those that straight-up copy them. A good example of the former, which Boardwalk might want to think about, is Widowspeak. They share Quintero's Mazzy Star leanings and draw from a long history of spaghetti westerns, but Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas assemble those sources into compelling songs that aren't quite like anything we've heard before. Whether Boardwalk are willing or able to expand their repertoire into something more distinctive remains to be seen; so far, it's hard to find anything on their debut that suggests capacity for growth. At this point in their nascent career, Boardwalk definitely have a good ear for melody–the problem is it doesn't sound like their own.
