Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark, 2008)

Beach House’s Devotion packs a surprising amount of excitement into such a thoroughly laidback album. Alex Scally’s clean, full-bodied, and reverb-laden Fender Strat hollows out a basin deep enough to envelope the simultaneous flooding of Victoria Legrand’s temperate, shifting arsenal of organs (they used a variety of settings on each of six different organs, according to an interview in Remix magazine), and sturdy enough to withstand Legrand’s bellowing, confident vocals. Devotion finds the Baltimore duo conjuring a fuller, more resonant sound than most four-pieces can muster, which stands in contrast to the comparatively cool, muffled gauze of their spectacular self-titled 2006 debut. While it would be a disservice to the dreary brilliance of Beach House to say that Devotion is that huge a leap beyond it, given that the improvement is largely production-related, the diplomatic praise would be that Devotion not only holds the Beach House torch up high but also brightens it considerably.

Both albums feature perfectly strong, doleful songs of haunting texture and style completely apart from the dominating modes of the day. The inherent songwriting approach is consistent from one album to the next; Devotion is not only every bit the Beach House album that Beach House is, but also serves to confirm for us what exactly that means. The broad stride forward is in its clarity and fidelity, which tear the shades off Beach House’s wintry windows to let some incandescence in. The cloudiness and distance were actually part of the earlier LP’s charm; it was a cold and ethereal jewel, whereas the lovers’ reverie of Devotion rises like vapor from hunks of dry ice to twist into sinuous HD coils rather than fill the room with icy fog. Legrand’s bold voice is more assertive this time around, more squarely hits the notes, and Scally’s guitar sounds a welcome notch or two higher in the mix. It’s still dream pop, just for a far more lucid dream. Melody and texture are equal powers in the experience of these songs; they both float and engage, at once sedative and striking.

“Heart of Chambers” is a staggering, dramatic testament to the throes of love and longing, an album highlight rivaled by the slightly livelier, bittersweet blues of “Gila.” There are no lowlights here, although one other particularly exciting element to the album is Beach House’s surefooted landing alongside fellow indie (er, former indie) heavyweights Built to Spill and Beck in the chronicle of artists to cover Daniel Johnston’s classic, heart-rending Jad Fair collaboration, “Some Things Last a Long Time.” The Beach House rendition is a feat that’s easily on par and most conveniently compared to the Cowboy Junkies well-respected cover of “Sweet Jane.” It tranquilizes rewardingly and reinvents a comparatively high-strung original into something both deferential and yet totally its own; an irresistibly serene cover that remains every bit as emotive as its foundation, that is, within the realm of reasonable mental stability—there’s only one Daniel Johnston, after all.

Interestingly, where the Cowboy Junkies took a relatively rockin’ Velvets number and ironed it down to their own opiate-molasses pace, Beach House takes a gently anxious, damaged piano rock aria and pacifies it into something sonically and stylistically vis-à-vis the Velvets’ “Pale Blue Eyes”, all the way down to the lonesome tambourine hits, albeit much slower and drenched in reverb. Yet despite their standard, inevitable debt to those progenitors of calm, clean, and dreamy rock ‘n’ roll, Beach House covers their tracks both literally and figuratively with a quality of vintage originality. Their songs are timeless, direct, and unhurried, plus they use old organs, master their digital tracks back through analog tape, and are outspoken lovers of vinyl (hence the simultaneous release of Devotion on both CD and double-gatefold LP). They’re old-school audiophiles and shrewdly leveraged the clout from their acclaimed debut into ample studio time to really concretize their vision. No sign of sophomore slump here, folks. Devotion is, in fact, not only a milestone for Beach House, but is now and will probably survive as one of the best albums of 2008.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]