Beach House - Beach House

Beach House is a duo from Baltimore, Maryland consisting of Victoria Legrand on lead vocals/organ and Alex Scally on guitar. Their nine song debut released last fall has received the obligatory associations that any band of this style (late 60’s psychedelia) and of this number (a duo) would be expected receive.
If I were to take all the comparisons to Mazzy Star as gospel, I would be all over this thing like Christ on a cross. The fact is, it’s actually more like Opal, David Roback’s band with Kendra Smith before he gained recognition with Mazzy.
Then again, being compared to Opal is perhaps even a little more worthy in my book.
Truth be told, Beach House is way more barren than Happy Nightmare Baby. With an organ and a reverb drenched slide guitar as the main musical backdrop, Legrand’s vocals are clearly the spotlight instrument and it’s one that’s not quite fully developed.
Scally misses a few notes here and there which, strangely, add even more to already obvious narcotic feel.
The primitive production places a lot of echo under Legrand’s voice, which is occasionally double tracked throughout the disc. Scally’s guitar is a wall of sound in the mix with a lone organ (sometimes with a baroque feel, other times with a Rhodes setting, and some with a more traditional sound), propelled by a tambourine or the rhythm generator directly on the keyboard itself.
Outside of the aforementioned influences, there seems to be a lineage to Nico’s more avant-garde offerings on Reprise (The Marble Index and Desertshore). While Legrand possesses a style that’s not as identifiable as Nico, she carries a more mainstream approach and displays a greater range than the German chanteuse.
Beach House has an intentional demo quality throughout the disc, and because of that, there’s really nothing that stands out beyond noteworthy. The opener “Saltwater,” “Master Of None” and the epic closer “Heart And Lungs” all touch on some great things while “Auburn And Ivory” and “Childhood” hint at it. The remaining tracks seem content with merely channeling elements of the band’s influences, seemingly content with sounding out of place in an environment where Pro-Tools-created abilities are (thankfully) avoided. The downfall is that the direction they’ve decided to pursue shows the duo’s limitations, which points to the obvious fact that Beach House simply needed a few more rehearsals before committing their material to tape.
In other words: this Beach House still needs a few minor repairs before its ready to be lived in.