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Beach House Depression Cherry Sub Pop

02.09.15

Sometimes it’s hard to believe Victoria LeGrand and Alex Scally aren’t a couple. Certainly judging by nearly a decade’s worth of music as Beach House, the pair seem to exist in a state of permanent somnambulant lockstep, roaming across the horizons of one another’s dreams by way of swirling vintage organ melodies and breathy, lovelorn harmonies.

On Depression Cherry, Legrand and Scally have narrowed their field of vision slightly but increased their sense of focus. Where Bloom was a widescreen, lush suite of songs, each effectively acting as a movement within a greater whole, Depression Cherry sees the two opt for sophisticated electronic minimalism and individual song craft. It’s a record that feels at once colder but more intimate, the sterile rigidity of the rhythm underpinning a song like Beyond Love actually serving to isolate and so magnify the impact of couplets such as: “Vision spun into dreams / of a world left without it.”

All of which isn’t to say the music’s not characteristically gorgeous. Six-minute bookends Levitation and Days of Candy are both wondrous slow-burners, with LeGrand and Scally parlaying their predilection for droning layers of keys into the production of a pair of outright miniature epics. Meanwhile PPP lasts another half-dozen minutes and sounds closest to a Bloom cut, replete with a properly bombastic coda. Of course there’s ultimately a pervasive sense of melancholia to all of this that tempers any elation but then, nobody would have it any other way. Yet again, Beach House make sadness sound endlessly alluring.