The world of Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House’s music – and it is a world – is hinged on immersion.
For the past 13 years, the pair have woven pop for dreamers and synesthetes. Their music is synonymous with a wall of sound, channelled through cheap vintage keyboards that would sound like toys in the hands of anyone else. Beach House rarely tear up this musical blueprint album to album – instead preferring to refine their enveloping sound to the point of divinity.
Last year’s 7 was regarded by many as the album their discography had been building up to, and it seemed like the heavens thought so too – their seventh album brought them to a total of 77 songs, something the band said connected to “some kind of heavy truth”.
7 also contained frontwoman Victoria Legrand’s most evocative lyricism to date, as the contralto-voiced singer channelled the underside of starlet glamour in Andy Warhol’s Factory. Album highlight ‘Drunk in LA’ paints an aging actress slumped at a bar in the so-called city of stars, her time as a bright ingenue long forgotten.
B-side ‘Alien’, released in October, is the step-sister to this tune – recorded near the end of 7’s sessions, despite the fact that Legrand knew the record was already complete. Its live drumming and waves of ethereal guitar, courtesy of Alex Scally, most closely recall the dense shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine, while Legrand pulls from somewhere more unexpected.
“It’s kind of a punk song – like Ramones-y in the way that I’ve always been attracted to succinct melody lines that have very strong visual imagery,” Legrand says. “Each line is only three words but every word matters.”
The song is also Legrand’s most imagistic tribute to the Warholian avatars of desire, Nico and Edie Sedgwick – the line “fake flowers to the grave for you” encapsulates the paradoxical permanence and impermanence of stardom, as damaged starlets fade away.
“It goes back and forth because plastic flowers never die. It’s like the ultimate sad fuck-off,” Legrand laughs. “I heard the whole phrase in my head at once. I was kind of imagining a scenario where it’s like a movie with a 1970’s movie star dying alone, having absolutely nobody. They like you when you’re hot, but they don’t care when you’re not.”
Legrand’s writing often forms out of these spontaneous, subconscious phrases – sometimes however, she takes years of what she calls “gut-editing”. Legrand uses 7’s ‘L’Inconnue’ as an example – the first song the Parisian-born singer has ever sung in the French language. The track first appeared in untitled form six years ago, going mostly unnoticed in the Rodarte fashion film This Must Be the Only Fantasy.
“I’d been asked so many times if I would sing in French, and I always said that I won’t – I’m not going to go out of my way to make like a hip-French song,” Legrand explains.
“The “un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, toutes les filles ne sont pas prêtes…” French part was written in one of those moments that just came out of me – I heard that and I sung it in French. The rest of that song took six years to become what it is on 7.”
‘L’Inconnue’s staggered vocal layers, and warbling synth lines appear to confirm 7’s songs have production the duo “could never recreate live” – something they expressed in an essay released prior to the record’s release. Legrand dismisses this now – at the time of our conversation last year, they had been touring for two and a half months. By the time they reach Australia in March, it will be half a year.
“You can throw that quote out, because it’s happening,” Legrand laughs. “The live aspect is never easy. Every time we embark on an album cycle, it’s always different. It takes a great deal of effort to appropriately understand where you are now and all of the things that you did over the last decade. I think we’ve found a place where they can all live, under the umbrella of our Beach House imagination.”
Beach House play The Forum on Friday March 8 [sold out] on top of their performance at Golden Plains, which goes down from Friday March 8 and Sunday March 10.
