In 1990, the Anglo-Irish band My Bloody Valentine recorded a song called “Soon.” It had just four components: a simple, jittering drum loop; a cheeky keyboard pattern; gliding, indistinct vocals; and a towering wall of guitar noise, which, like a sculpture by Richard Serra, seemed dense enough to bend under its own weight. Played loud, it was beautiful, scary, and infinitely textured—a wave powered by a jet engine. The song became a minor hit and a critical sensation; during a talk at MOMA, Brian Eno praised it as “the vaguest piece of music ever to become a hit” and said that it “set a new standard” in rock and roll. What made it unique was its combination of power and vagueness. Listening to it was like being crushed by a cloud.
My Bloody Valentine helped create a new rock-and-roll genre: some critics called it “shoegaze,” referring to the motionless, eyes-on-the-guitar posture of the performers, while others, thinking of its gauzy sonics and out-of-focus vocals, called it “dream pop.” Not all of it is noisy. In 1995, Slowdive, one of the best shoegaze bands, wrote “Blue Skied an’ Clear,” which is like “Soon” in reverse. Instead of guitars, voices rise in waves, while Neil Halstead, the band’s vocalist, drifts through the chorus: “You say ‘love,’ and it sounds so good. You say ‘life,’ and it sounds so sweet.” Despite its lack of guitar noise, “Blue Skied an’ Clear” shares with “Soon” an atmosphere both ethereal and heavy, mystical and ambivalent, lovelorn and hard-edged. It encapsulates the vibe of dream pop: transcendent but tense.
Twenty-five years later, a lot of bands are still exploring the territory charted by “Soon” and, especially, “Blue Skied an’ Clear.” The best of them is Beach House, a surprisingly popular duo from Baltimore. Like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, Beach House communicates a sense of shadowy power, but its two songwriters, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, have pushed the shoegaze/dream-pop sound in a new direction. Instead of relying mainly on guitars, their songs are built on a foundation of shimmering, droning electric organ. And, where many dream-pop vocalists are angelic, Legrand’s voice is deep, forceful, and oracular. She sings with smoky, crooning glamour, but also with an uncanny self-possession. Beach House songs aren’t cathartic, and they tend not to have dramatic climaxes; instead, they build toward a perfect arrangement of voice, guitar, organ, and drum machine, and then, after hovering for a few moments in that groove, disassemble it. (At Pitchfork, Jayson Greene writes that “the bone structures of these songs are closer to dance tracks—with builds, drops, peaks, and switch-ups—than the flourishes of traditional pop songwriting.”) The band’s songs aren’t about emotional moments, but emotional states. Lyrically, they tend to be mysterious songs about mystery.
If Beach House were an actual beach house, it would be fairly small. Scally and Legrand write just a few kinds of songs. There are meditative, organ-heavy jams, like “Apple Orchard,” from the 2006 album “Beach House”; abstract torch songs, like “Gila,” from 2008’s “Devotion” (A$AP Rocky loves this one, as do I); slow-burning, steady-state epics, like “10 Mile Stereo,” from the 2010 album “Teen Dream”; and concise, spellbinding pop singles, like “Myth,” from the 2012 album “Bloom.” Their new album, “Depression Cherry,” which is out this Friday, adds a few new elements—some spoken word, some choral singing—and the new songs seem more reticent, with less pop appeal, than they’ve been in a while. Still, Beach House sounds more like itself than ever. There are many moments of chilly, flowering, ambiguous beauty. Most of the tracks end before you want them to. (“Things change before they are over,” Legrand sings.) As always, listening to the songs, you can’t quite figure out what emotion they’re trying to evoke. Eventually, and suddenly, they move you anyway; you listen again, on the trail of a feeling you can’t name.
T. S. Eliot had a theory about poetry, which he explained in an essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Most of us, Eliot wrote, think of poets as people who express their feelings in verse. He thought poetry was stranger than that. As Eliot saw it, poets were less like people and more like laboratories. “The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express,” he wrote, “but a particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” Within this medium, ordinary emotions are compressed together until they produce an “art emotion”—an emotion that doesn’t exist in ordinary life, and is available only through the poem. That’s the whole point of poetry: while we’re under its spell, we’re not ourselves, or anyone; we feel things no ordinary person feels. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he concluded.
Eliot’s theory perfectly describes his own poems; it probably isn’t true about poetry in general. Even so, a lot of great poetry—and great art—has been created with his idea, or something like it, in mind. There are many successful singer-songwriters out there who are expressing their feelings and winning us over with personality and charisma. Then, there’s Beach House. It’s hard to say what they’re like as people, or what their songs mean. But they have created a separate space for new feelings and, in doing so, made our inner lives a little bigger than they used to be.
