Beach House – Holy Dances

There’s a knock at the door. A German-sounding man in his fifties politely asks if Beach House would mind letting two crack-smoking sisters use their dressing room for a while. Tensions are high. It’s late 2007 and Baltimore’s dream-pop duo are topping a variety bill that has attracted only a handful of people to one of London’s smallest venues. For a little-known band, this does not feel like an auspicious beginning.

Fast forward a few years: there are more albums, more scars, a different sound and a different outlook. Victoria Legrand even has some words of advice to give her old self, if she could. “I’d say: ‘things are going to happen that you won’t want or expect, but it’s for the better. It’s going to allow you to make room for the more important things in your life. So chill out’. But I always say that to myself now too. I say, ‘Victoria, you just need to take it easy and stop being so neurotic’.”

Legrand is sitting in the passenger seat of an old Toyota parked within a gated community in Towson, just outside Baltimore. It’s cold. She bites her words at first, but it doesn’t take her long to warm. She knows how to steam up those windows. For the last year, Legrand and Alex Scally have put everything into making Teen Dream – an album already tipped for 2010’s best-of lists. There is no personal life anymore, she says. Just Beach House. The day job is long gone. “I would bartend during the day and usually someone would come in and tell me way too much information. But you give them back energy because you don’t want them to go and kill themselves. I don’t really miss that.”

She has trouble remembering what year it is, having spent just one month out of the last 12 at home, and relationships have suffered. “We were forced to let things go. If you have a loved one, it’s hard to say goodbye. But it’s okay, you know? You grow and you change. I feel like we’re slightly different people now. Our obsessions are more intense. We’re both really high-speed people in so many ways. Mentally overactive and at our worst, dissatisfied. It’s like trying to stay calm in a hurricane. So a lot of silly things just filter away, but it’s all been very natural. You can’t have everything in life.”

As much as 2010 is expected to be a breakthrough year for Beach House, the pair have routinely maintained that this is just the beginning. And of course, you would too. But what if this is their peak? What if, in 15 years time, Beach House find themselves playing Teen Dream as part of ATP’s Don’t Look Back series?

“You can’t control what happens to you in life,” she says. “It’s like when you get on a plane and you go, ‘have I had a good life up until this moment?’ So if the plane goes down, you know you have. That’s very much how I feel. All the work I’ve done up until this record, I’m proud of. And it’s been difficult. Some of it you doubt, some of it you’re happy with. But you believe in it all. So as long as you keep having those feelings, I’m not fearful of what will happen. But it’s an interesting place to be: to realise that a moment in your life is the best moment. It doesn’t have to be depressing or embarrassing or humiliating. That’s just how life is. It’s brutally honest.”

Legrand, now 28, moved to Baltimore on a whim after becoming disillusioned with acting. Born in Paris to the brother of French composer Michel Legrand, she grew up between Maryland and Philadelphia before returning to Paris to study theatre at the International School of Jacques Lecoq. After meeting Scally through a mutual friend, the two decided to combine her classically-trained piano and operatic singing with his still-fledgling guitar playing. They spent the summer of 2005 holed up in a basement where intense writing sessions utilised the antiquated feel of their instruments: the rich tones of near-broken amps, old organs, a “strange archaic beat machine” and the sleepy drone of Scally’s slide guitar.

They still have the “same shitty instruments” and they’ve kept that simplicity intact. But just as Beach House have a fixed idea of what they want from the music, so too do the audience. Until now, the feedback has remained consistent: the same touchstone adjectives keep appearing. And maybe they’re right, Legrand admits. Even now, disrupting the template with more complex songwriting and production, certain things remain: the tension of infatuation and the pitfalls of love.

“We’re not melancholic people but I think there’s definitely a colour in our music that’s always there. Heartbreak, I think, comes when you just love uncontrollably, when you take risks. Some people get real into comfort and, sure, it is a form of love. It is. But then there’s dangerous love. ‘I’m not supposed to do this’ love. ‘I’m not supposed to love you’ love. ‘You’re the wrong person to love!’ But when you experience heartbreak, you come out the other side of it and you’re stronger. And the next love you experience will be more intense and even better. Because you allowed yourself to fall on your face and you gave yourself completely. In some ways being in Beach House is a similar feeling. You throw yourself wildly into something, very passionately. The rupture between that and a domestic life of nine to five, there’s a heartbreak that occurs. And, like love, sometimes it last years, sometimes it may come back to haunt you.”

Photo by katiew, licensed under Creative Commons

Young Man – Just A Growin’

Young Man – Heart of Chambes (Beach House cover)

Young Man is 20-year-old Colin Caulfield, he of YouTube cover versions fame, previously praised by Bradford Cox for his take on Rainwater Cassette Exchange and featured here for his version of Grizzly Bear’s ‘While You Wait For The Others’. Well, since then Caulfield has been working on an EP entitled Boy in his Chicago bedroom and even has a gig lined up at one of my favourite venues, La Fleche D’Or in Paris, in two weeks. Hopefully more good stuff is still to come…

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Photo by <sïanaïs>, licensed under Creative Commons

Beach House – Norway (Live)

A third album from Beach House is on the way and after a couple of listens, I can already tell that there are some future classics on there: namely ‘Zebra’, ‘Norway’ and ‘Walk in the Park’ (songs you’ll have heard if you’ve seen Beach House in the last six months). In fact all the strongest tracks come in the first half, which will make for a great Side A, before the momentum slows and tapers off somewhat into the band’s template of old. In that sense Teen Dream is more of a renewal than a departure, but this one might be their best yet.

The album will be released on 25 January on Bella Union (Sub Pop in the US).

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Lands & Peoples – Bad Habits

Baltimore’s Lands & Peoples have just released a self-titled EP of gorgeous dream pop, all of which you can stream online here or buy yourself a copy for a paltry $5. You can download their previous instrumental EP, &, for free here or if you’re anywhere near their hometown, make sure to catch them when they play with Kurt Vile and Espers at The Talking Head club on 11 August – looks like it will be a great show.

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Photo by Sundve, licensed under Creative Commons.

This is a Grizzly Bear cover version from the same “mysterious YouTuber” that Bradford Cox singled out for praise recently on his blog after discovering a cover of Rainwater Cassette Exchange. Like the other mysterious YouTube renditions of Two Weeks I posted in February, this guy has also covered Animal Collective and Panda Bear – as well as Beach House, Bon Iver and some original recordings. Check them all out, they’re well worth a listen on the headphones. If you keep an eye on the sidebar of related videos, you can go on a never ending trail of bedroom cover versions of similar tracks – like Deep Blue Sea and Turtle Island.

Papercuts – Future Primitive

It’s been two years since we  heard from Papercuts’ Jason Robert Quever, when Can’t Go Back emerged from under the wings of Andy Cabic and Devendra Banhart’s label Gnomosong. Since then, Quever has working with Beach House, Cass McCombs and Vetiver. But this track, from the forthcoming You Can Have What You Want, sounds like a refreshing step forward for Papercuts, the r’n'b bass line and mumbled melody suggesting that something from his time with the aforementioned bands has rubbed off.

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Photo by smallcaps, licensed under Creative Commons

Beach House – Play the Game  (Queen cover)

When filtered through Beach House’s characteristic aesthetic, this song sounds like it was written for them. According to GvsB, it was left off the recent Dark Was the Knight compilation, which surprises me. Not just because it’s a quality trac, but because my main quibble with the release was that it seemed like they didn’t leave off anything. For the time being, you can download this as a bonus track on iTunes and watch the video for the original below.

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Photo by katiew, licensed under Creative Commons

Fleet Foxes will make their Irish debut when the play Whelans with Beach House on Saturday 14th June. Definitely one to watch out for.