Beach House have managed to build a legendary catalogue of mystifying, awe-inspiring music thats strength lies both in its sameness and its subtle maturation. They perfected the wheel years ago; the thrill has been in hearing them play with its impeccable form, popping on some spinning rims or knocking out spokes as needed.
And so, if we're going by score cards and expected patterns, the massive double album is arriving right on time. The 18-track, 85-minute Once Twice Melody is designed, in the grand legacy of major albums from major bands, to be Beach House's crown jewel. It's the record that's meant to gather all the good will and artistic depth they've cultivated in the last decade and change, blowing it up to sky-scraping, Olympic proportions. For the most part, it succeeds.
To say Beach House are incapable of making a bad song would likely be a lie. However, as of this writing, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have never released a truly bad song. Even at their most comfortable, the fundamentals of the duo's sound will yield a listenable (beautiful, usually) piece of escapist dreampop. The issue with Once Twice Melody is that it tends to confirm this theory.
Once Twice Melody is not quite enough and just a bit too much. It's not an issue of runtime — there's little doubt that Beach House are entirely capable of making a dynamic, engaging 18-track (or longer) album. It's more so a flaw in sequencing and production choices, a failure to account for the record's overwhelming, distinction-dissolving nature when it's being heard consecutively and not in the four EP-length dispatches in which it was released. There's also, at times, the difficult-to-shake feeling that the band is on autopilot, as if you've heard these songs before despite their beefier, new-fangled trappings.
The duo self-produced for the first time in their careers, and while the record sounds routinely gorgeous — luxe and lush, colourful and surprisingly confronting — there's a verging-on-obnoxious lack of negative space in the arrangements. Nearly every opportunity for silence is filled with washes of reverb, tides of synth or weeping strings, like air suffocated by pollen. It has the effect of a weighted blanket, a silken heaviness that begins to settle uncomfortably on your bones after more than an hour of gilded maximalism. The album's overwhelming sonic enormity is by design — in an interview with Apple Music, Scally pointed to the blockbuster opulence of '80s pop and metal, describing how the duo found inspiration in music that "almost felt gaudy, but it was so intense and powerful." They certainly embodied that glitter-bomb (maybe more of a paillette-torpedo) heft, taking their already-shimmery music to a place of total, world-swallowing fantasy.
But after the first eight tracks — seven of which stretch beyond four minutes — it just feels like a lot, as if you're listening to a weapons-grade singles collection rather than an album of songs meant to converse with and inform one another. For all the talk of sonic diversity, the songs on Once Twice Melody have a strange sameness to them, an immense wave of fluorescent sound that manages to overwhelm the subtle textures that should set them apart.
These qualms (while fundamental to the listening experience) are forgivable, and even sometimes forgettable, when the album works. This is Beach House after all, and the duo's relative stumbles still make for gorgeous and occasionally show-stopping music. "Pink Funeral," "New Romance," "Superstar" and "Only You Know" can stand tall alongside the band's strongest songs, and the record manages to find some dynamic footing on the second half — ebbing and flowing in a way that the previous 40 minutes does not — despite most of the best tracks belonging to the first.
And though the familiarity with the duo's melodic and instrumental choices is often difficult to shake, Once Twice Melody does find them traversing new ground: the guitar-free synthpop of the menacing "Masquerade" or spritely "Hurts to Love" feel more swift-footed than the churning bangers that precede them, while the gorgeous "Finale" finds the duo dismantling their sound and refashioning it into something more sharp and metallic. Still, these experiments can't help but feel like Legrand and Scally pulling back from the twisted majesty of 7, sanding off some of that record's more dangerous corners.
Beach House songs have rarely been about capturing particulars; Legrand's lyrics are typically impressionistic, abstracted vignettes that aim to capture the wild essence of feeling rather than be bogged down in specifics. But on Once Twice Melody, Legrand's dreamworld lyrical preoccupations — boys, girls, day, night, stars, diamonds, mirrors, swans, and horizons and lights of all varieties — become frustratingly faceless. There are pockets of illuminating narrative, like the dispatch from the passenger seat on the acoustic, glittering "Bells," but it's hard to shake the feeling that you could play a game of Beach House Mad Libs and come away with the same result.
While the album is epic in scope and regularly beautiful, Once Twice Melody feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. A Beach House record is best experienced like a shooting star, thrilling for its relative scarcity and singular propulsion. Once Twice Melody feels more like a sunset than a shot of light from the universe's depths — magnificent and enormous, yes, but also familiar.
Here was Beach House's chance to send an asteroid at their patiently-evolving planet, to blow things apart and sculpt something new from the mountains of rubble. Maybe that's too much to expect, and it likely isn't what the majority of Beach House fans would even want. So instead, we get another glittering reassurance of the band's singular presence, another chance to bask in what it is they do so well. There are far worse gifts to be given than consistency.
(Sub Pop)And so, if we're going by score cards and expected patterns, the massive double album is arriving right on time. The 18-track, 85-minute Once Twice Melody is designed, in the grand legacy of major albums from major bands, to be Beach House's crown jewel. It's the record that's meant to gather all the good will and artistic depth they've cultivated in the last decade and change, blowing it up to sky-scraping, Olympic proportions. For the most part, it succeeds.
To say Beach House are incapable of making a bad song would likely be a lie. However, as of this writing, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have never released a truly bad song. Even at their most comfortable, the fundamentals of the duo's sound will yield a listenable (beautiful, usually) piece of escapist dreampop. The issue with Once Twice Melody is that it tends to confirm this theory.
Once Twice Melody is not quite enough and just a bit too much. It's not an issue of runtime — there's little doubt that Beach House are entirely capable of making a dynamic, engaging 18-track (or longer) album. It's more so a flaw in sequencing and production choices, a failure to account for the record's overwhelming, distinction-dissolving nature when it's being heard consecutively and not in the four EP-length dispatches in which it was released. There's also, at times, the difficult-to-shake feeling that the band is on autopilot, as if you've heard these songs before despite their beefier, new-fangled trappings.
The duo self-produced for the first time in their careers, and while the record sounds routinely gorgeous — luxe and lush, colourful and surprisingly confronting — there's a verging-on-obnoxious lack of negative space in the arrangements. Nearly every opportunity for silence is filled with washes of reverb, tides of synth or weeping strings, like air suffocated by pollen. It has the effect of a weighted blanket, a silken heaviness that begins to settle uncomfortably on your bones after more than an hour of gilded maximalism. The album's overwhelming sonic enormity is by design — in an interview with Apple Music, Scally pointed to the blockbuster opulence of '80s pop and metal, describing how the duo found inspiration in music that "almost felt gaudy, but it was so intense and powerful." They certainly embodied that glitter-bomb (maybe more of a paillette-torpedo) heft, taking their already-shimmery music to a place of total, world-swallowing fantasy.
But after the first eight tracks — seven of which stretch beyond four minutes — it just feels like a lot, as if you're listening to a weapons-grade singles collection rather than an album of songs meant to converse with and inform one another. For all the talk of sonic diversity, the songs on Once Twice Melody have a strange sameness to them, an immense wave of fluorescent sound that manages to overwhelm the subtle textures that should set them apart.
These qualms (while fundamental to the listening experience) are forgivable, and even sometimes forgettable, when the album works. This is Beach House after all, and the duo's relative stumbles still make for gorgeous and occasionally show-stopping music. "Pink Funeral," "New Romance," "Superstar" and "Only You Know" can stand tall alongside the band's strongest songs, and the record manages to find some dynamic footing on the second half — ebbing and flowing in a way that the previous 40 minutes does not — despite most of the best tracks belonging to the first.
And though the familiarity with the duo's melodic and instrumental choices is often difficult to shake, Once Twice Melody does find them traversing new ground: the guitar-free synthpop of the menacing "Masquerade" or spritely "Hurts to Love" feel more swift-footed than the churning bangers that precede them, while the gorgeous "Finale" finds the duo dismantling their sound and refashioning it into something more sharp and metallic. Still, these experiments can't help but feel like Legrand and Scally pulling back from the twisted majesty of 7, sanding off some of that record's more dangerous corners.
Beach House songs have rarely been about capturing particulars; Legrand's lyrics are typically impressionistic, abstracted vignettes that aim to capture the wild essence of feeling rather than be bogged down in specifics. But on Once Twice Melody, Legrand's dreamworld lyrical preoccupations — boys, girls, day, night, stars, diamonds, mirrors, swans, and horizons and lights of all varieties — become frustratingly faceless. There are pockets of illuminating narrative, like the dispatch from the passenger seat on the acoustic, glittering "Bells," but it's hard to shake the feeling that you could play a game of Beach House Mad Libs and come away with the same result.
While the album is epic in scope and regularly beautiful, Once Twice Melody feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. A Beach House record is best experienced like a shooting star, thrilling for its relative scarcity and singular propulsion. Once Twice Melody feels more like a sunset than a shot of light from the universe's depths — magnificent and enormous, yes, but also familiar.
Here was Beach House's chance to send an asteroid at their patiently-evolving planet, to blow things apart and sculpt something new from the mountains of rubble. Maybe that's too much to expect, and it likely isn't what the majority of Beach House fans would even want. So instead, we get another glittering reassurance of the band's singular presence, another chance to bask in what it is they do so well. There are far worse gifts to be given than consistency.