On their 2008 tour for Devotion, Beach House had a t-shirt for sale at their merch table featuring the album title spelled out in the sort of gothic font you see on death-metal album covers, creating a cheeky contrast between the grim presentation and the band's tranquil hazy-headed dream-pop. But those two aesthetic poles blurred into one upon hearing the striking debut single from Gardens & Villa. Ideal for summertime strolls through a cemetery, "Black Hills" pits vibraphone chimes against an icy synth pulse overtop an unnervingly steady beat. And while "Black Hills" presents magisterial images of mountains, seas, and high tides, its environment feels tensely claustrophobic, with Chris Lynch's elastic, androgynous voice projecting serenity and severity in equal measure. It's the sort of song you could easily imagine Beach House coming up with, were they to follow-up the lushness of Teen Dream with something more sinister.
But the self-titled debut album that "Black Hills" opens shows Gardens & Villa to be something more complex than just a Beach Hearse. That such a moody outfit hails from sunny Santa Barbara is but a surface indication of their curious qualities. With a lyric sheet that's preoccupied with nature and mysticism-- not to mention a singer who's not afraid to whip out a flute-- Gardens & Villa could easily be pegged as hippies. But they're also keen on playing up the artificial qualities of their music, foregrounding synthesizers and mechanized, metronomic rhythms to create a peculiar hybrid of 1960s and 80s sensibilities. (One song bears the particularly apt title of "Neon Dove".) As such, the austerity of their sound can make them seem both sternly serious and, at times, rather goofy. (See: the ping-ponged synth-pop of "Spacetime", wherein the title is repeated in a comically spooky voice, as if it were the intro to some old Saturday morning cartoon.) Given their fondness for the classic and the plastic, it's no surprise Gardens & Villa feel equally at home recording their album with piano-bar bard Richard Swift as touring with hipster hype magnets Foster the People.
But if the ambiguous quality of their sound sometimes makes it hard to become emotionally invested in Gardens & Villa, in Lynch, they're blessed with a singer who has remarkable presence and poise. For all the effeminate intimations in his voice, he never uses it for pure affectation or gratuitous, histrionic effect. And though the band has been quick to cite the percussive funk of Talking Heads as a driving influence, they truly excel at crafting atmospheric ballads: the Low-like hymn "Chemtrails" and, especially, the foreboding "Sunday Morning", a rainy-day requiem that favorably recalls the retro-futurist psych-pop of the United States of America or Broadcast. It's hard to predict where Gardens & Villa might go from here: bombastic, drum-circle-ready closer "Neon Dove" carries the possibility of Yeasayer-styled transition from misfits to populists, while "Orange Blossom" suggests a desire to join Wild Beasts on the art-funk fringes. But in the flute-tootin' Lynch, they've got a pied piper worth following down whichever path he takes.
