Teen Dream is Beach House’s best album. There is no question about this; the Baltimore duo’s first album for Seattle’s superindie label, Sub Pop, sees the band finally shake all of its inappropriately tacked-on points of reference, like Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star, and become an entity that is wholly and uniquely its own, with its strongest, most accomplished and grandest songs yet.
Unlike its predecessor Devotion, which sounded like a refinement of the band’s self-titled debut, Teen Dream‘s songs retain the band’s signature instrumental palette of organ-guitar-voice, but they rarely ever sound narcotized or subdued. This is obvious from the opening minute of the first track “Zebra,” where for the first time in the band’s history their drum sounds are actually pushing the song forward, rather than merely decorating it. Alex Scally’s guitar lead no longer sounds like the product of early-morning experimentation, and Victoria Legrand’s voice sounds more confident and nowhere near as hazy as it once did. The song builds to a huge chorus and ends with the sound of a crash cymbal and a riff strikingly similar to the one at the heart of Weezer’s “No Other One.” “Norway” is dominated by these drums and Legrand’s breathy backup vocals, which become addictive through their insistence. “Lover Of Mine” is practically ’80s dance-pop stripped of all of the clichés of 2000s approaches to ’80s dance-pop. This leaves it more reminiscent of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s songs for “Twin Peaks” and Blue Velvet, soundtracking some sort of intense and deeply warped teenage love. There are moments that still make them sound like a girl group on downers (consider “Walk in the Park” and “Silver Soul,” the moments closest to treading water, saved predominantly by melodic strength), but these new songs are almost never formulaic, and this is a very good thing.
If there’s an easy way to demonstrate the band’s growth over the course of a year, it’s likely “Used To Be,” a rerecorded version that comes halfway through the album. It was originally released as a single on the band’s old label, Carpark, with a much sparser arrangement and without the coda. Its sleepiness has been replaced with driving rhythms, crescendos and Legrand’s vocals, which are far less uniform in delivery than they ever were before. There’s also “10 Mile Stereo,” the loudest, most insistent and quite possibly strongest song the band has delivered to date. It opens to picked guitar, but a wall of subdued noise and organ chords compete directly with Legrand’s voice, which is ultimately overtaken by organ and insistent, driving drum machines pushing it further and further away from the conventions of their sound. When she sings “they say we will go far, but they don’t know how far we’ll go,” it’s hard not to see her speaking directly about her band, which has proven just how much potential it has.
In almost every way, Teen Dream makes good on its ambitions. It’s the most intense, most affecting record of the band’s career, the first good pop record of 2010 and proof that Beach House doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the bands they are so frequently compared to. Unlike Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star, Beach House is making progress, and that’s something worth celebrating.
