Beach House
Devotion

When the air starts to feel like spring, and Sunday afternoons get longer, and at six you hear the nightingales sing, I have an overwhelming desire to listen to autistic music. Just to create for myself a hidden passage through the hollow seasons. This year, the second album by Beach House is just what I need.

Many church-like organs, a minimal guitar, very thin regularly sampled drums (by necessity: Beach House are two, and they are not the White Stripes), a deep female voice, velvety melodies. It feels serene and claustrophobic at the same time. It brings to mind the senseless melancholies of childhood, inside closed and muffled places, in seaside locations, without light, behind those heavy curtains used in the seventies and eighties, brown and beige, with lozenges.

Listening to "Gila" is a trip back to remote times. The drums are a caress, the harmonies fade, the voice is obsessive but soft, the guitar terribly retro. A whiter shade of pale. There are Air, the Portishead of "Glory Box", a dose of understated noir inserted into a vintage pop. Beach House add nothing new, but the overall effect (very compact, up to monotony) succeeds in evoking a unique atmosphere, which is built on a murky and somewhat unsettling intimacy.

The melody of "Turtle Island" is more ethereal, "Holy Dances" clearer, with tambourine and maracas giving exotic suggestions, and also "All The Years", which features one of the most accomplished melodies. There are no dissonances or derailments into other musical territories: the recipe of old-fashioned indie-tronica is respected to the end, without ever exceeding narcotized mid-tempo rhythms.

But it’s after listening to "Heart Of Chambers", with that delightful opening (angelic organ, two-string guitar riff, electric drums), that you decide this album will be your way to dive in this spring, especially when Victoria Legrand’s voice enters, which could be that of a stern and masculine old teacher, authoritative and penetrating. Songs like this, which powerfully evoke in your mind things you haven’t experienced but seem, by magic, as if you have, drive me crazy.

In the meantime, I’ll put this chorus away with my elementary school notebooks, and place the album among the brown vinyls bought at flea markets. And there it will grow, like wine in barrels.