Beach House’s Once Twice Melody begins “out in the summer sun,” dawning strings and downy acoustic guitars sketching a scene of pastoral bliss, and ends, 17 songs later, reaching “into the darkness,” where “the universe collects us.” It is a fittingly epic span for a pair of Baltimore stargazers who have never been shy about courting infinity. Between those two ephemeral points, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally luxuriate in the interplay of shadow and light, the scent of night-blooming flowers, the rhapsody of sensation itself. The first album that they have produced on their own, it hews to Beach House’s trademark dream-pop reverie—eight albums in, it is clearer than ever that they have no interest in breaking character or changing up the scenery—while billowing outward in every direction. The operative term is more, the operative mode superlative: bigger but also gauzier; more sumptuous, more diaphanous, more dazzling. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it.
From the current vantage point, Beach House’s entire career looks like one long, gradual process of transformation, a slowly winding path leading up to this point. Over the years, they have made subtle tweaks to the languid slowcore template they fashioned on their self-titled 2006 debut. The organ-heavy Depression Cherry wrapped itself in velvety drones that bristled with dissonance; 7 was darker and more muscular, tinged with a syrupy hit of shoegaze. They have never abandoned the attributes that make them inimitably Beach House; compare Once Twice Melody with a record like Devotion or Teen Dream, and it’s clearly the same band, yet profound changes have taken place.
Their evolution brings to mind the Ship of Theseus, a classic philosopher’s paradox. Imagine a vessel that, over the course of many years, has had all of its parts replaced: mast, rigging, sails, hull, all the way down to the very last nail. After a century’s worth of repairs, not a single original piece of the boat remains. It looks identical, but can it truly be said to be the same ship? Beach House, in contrast, have steadily upgraded their materials, replacing oak with titanium and sailcloth with Kevlar. They have swapped clean-toned electric guitar for surging shoegaze fuzz, traded the thrift-store keyboards and rickety home-organ rhythm presets for hi-def synthesizers and powerhouse live drumming, while Legrand’s ambiguously imagistic lyrics have become more grandiose and diffuse. The essence of their sound has remained the same, yet the contours have changed: They have transformed themselves from a weathered wooden boat into a gleaming, streamlined spaceship; from a twentysomething’s dogeared Moleskine into something as vast and ineffable as the metaverse—a rush of pure vibes, ephemeral and enveloping.
With 18 tracks and 84 minutes of running time, Beach House have plenty of room to try out different things, but Once Twice Melody invariably sounds phenomenal. There are feathery acoustic guitars and rosy vocoders, watery analog synths and chord changes that explode like fireworks against the night sky, and all of it has been mixed to emphasize its nuanced contrasts and swollen dimensions. In their soaring choruses and sumptuous arrays of synths, guitars, and percussion, they have taken on the proportions of spectacular, stadium-sized alt pop. (Guest drummer James Barone’s controlled wallop goes a long way toward establishing the record’s blockbuster footprint.) Where once they sounded indebted to bands like Mazzy Star or My Bloody Valentine, here they’re chasing a shiny brass ring bearing the fingerprints of Air, M83, even Tame Impala.
Their supersized instincts often serve them well. Driven by chugging electric guitars and a hint of the Cocteau Twins’ chiming leads, “Superstar” is a feast of texture set to heartstring-tugging chord changes. The stately “New Romance” boasts one of the sugariest hooks of the band’s catalog, with an irresistible (and meme-ready) chorus to match: “Last night I’m messing up/Now I feel like dressing up/ILYSFM.” The spangled “Over and Over” is slow and radiant, a Moroder-influenced power ballad whose celestial choirs boast megachurch wattage.
Along the way, they pull out some surprising references. Extending Legrand’s wistfully looped vocals over a driving 4/4 beat, “Only You Know” approximates the muted ecstasy of the Field’s 2007 melodic techno classic “Over the Ice.” The instrumental breakdown of the closing “Modern Love Stories” recalls the strummy acoustic grandeur of David Bowie’s “Five Years.” “Another Go Around,” lilting and luminous, could be mistaken for an Elliott Smith cover. There’s a rising set of chords in “The Bells” that’s a dead ringer for a passage from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” These echoes may be unconscious but they hardly seem accidental: The lyrics are peppered with phrases that sound like half-remembered bits of hallowed songs—“all the parties”; “a lust for life”; “there’s a light going out tonight”—and in the lullaby-like penultimate song, “Many Nights,” Legrand sings of “many nights/By your side/Listening high/To Suicide.” In part, Once Twice Melody is an album about shaping a life around listening, about the simple pleasures of losing yourself in music.
It is also a record about nameless yearning. The album is shot through with dozens of references to the skies and the stars, to light itself: “A flicker in the sky reflects the dying light”; “Sunshine in her lap/Centuries of light”; “Out of nothing comes the moonglow.” “The stars were there/In our eyes,” Legrand sings in “Superstar.” In “Pink Funeral,” she returns to the theme: “The painted stars they fill our eyes.” And on “Runaway,” someone’s hair is “melting into silver stars.” Though individual songs may be about love or memory or desire, the cumulative effect of all this brilliance feels like a leap into the sublime. As she sings in the closing “Modern Love Stories,” “A dark mouth surrounds us, into the stardust.”
There is no shortage of arresting imagery reflected in the glare of these slow-motion glitter bombs: swans on a starry lake, or headlights running up a wall, or, from the excellent “Sunset,” “spider silk and sweet nonsense,” which sounds almost like a metaphor for Legrand’s own lyrical impulses. But in a few places, she falls back on frustrating cliché. Certain stock phrases feel like placeholders for more interesting lines that never found their way to her notebook. Secondhand images betray their borrowed provenance: “Red sunglasses and a lollipop/See her dressed in the polka dot” sounds like Lolita via Lana Del Rey, a threadbare narrative hand-me-down. And in the otherwise gorgeous, country-kissed “The Bells,” Legrand’s couplets feel like well-worn tropes cut-and-pasted into her rhyme scheme: “Something somebody told me, think the plane is going down/You can’t take it with you, so let me buy you the next round.” It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’ve heard this story before. Legrand’s best lyrics, historically, have been vivid, cryptic, full of mystery, like folktales poorly translated from forgotten dialects. Where they were vague, they were provocatively so. But here, Legrand sometimes seems like she’s chasing moonbeams, hoping they will land on the object or feeling she’s trying to name.
Still, Beach House lyrics aren’t meant to be parsed on the page; they are as much about the sound of Legrand’s voice as the meaning of the words. Like everything else here, she, too, simply sounds incredible. Having abandoned all traces of the husky contralto that defined the group’s earlier records, she is all breath, and the softness of her tone suits the album’s gossamer materials: From the Stereolab-like la la la of the opening “Once Twice Melody,” she’s the embodiment of spider silk and sweet nonsense, a presence as ethereal as her songs.
Occasionally, amid Once Twice Melody’s overflowing cornucopia of feeling, I find myself wishing for something else: something weirder, more erratic, less narrowly focused on that insistent eyes-closed vibe. In their all-encompassing pursuit of mood, Beach House occasionally have trouble moving past the mood board, and they sacrifice risk on the altar of ambition. Shooting for the moon is a time-tested strategy. But what about digging into the muck? That’s what Low—a band whose essence is as unchanging as Beach House’s—have done with their last two albums, and the result was a pair of records that were not just enthralling but also genuinely surprising. For Beach House to turn the rapture up to 11 may be unexpected, but the sounds themselves are, by and large, familiar.
Yet as a slow drip of pure serotonin, Once Twice Melody delivers. It can be tempting to wonder if the album is too long, but the more time I have spent with it, the harder it has been to decide which tracks I might cut. They all—the ballads, the anthems, the lullabies, the synth-pop throwbacks—serve a purpose in fleshing out the enormity of Beach House’s spellbinding universe. The sprawl, the surfeit, is the point. You need plenty of room to summon a mood as widescreen as this. It’s a long way from the summer sun to the dark embrace of the universe, and on Once Twice Melody, Beach House are determined to cover the entire distance.
Buy: Rough Trade
