Beach House (Boston Phoenix, 3/23/10)

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME: Beach House’s music isn’t so a sad pop song as it is a blurry, sweet associative memory.

“The abstract has been very good to us.” I am communicating via e-mail with the two members of Baltimore’s dreamy pop choir Beach House, and to be honest, I don’t know which one of them made that statement. But since the sentence was printed rather than spoken, I was able to stare at it and think about it for a bit. The band are trying to explain the origin of the title of their new Teen Dream (Sub Pop) — or, more accurately, to dispel the notion that the album is about any actual teen dream. “The title has no literal imposition on the album, it was evoked as spontaneously as one decides to put whipped cream on a hot-fudge sundae. Like looking at a painting in a museum and feeling the vibrations from it, and then walking over and seeing the title. Things can make sense without having to be so direct.”

So true — and is there a better summation of Beach House? Teen Dream is their third long-player since they formed in Baltimore in 2004, and in the years between, they’ve attracted a growing cult to their peculiar brand of music — a beguilingly patient and hypnotic variation that distinguishes them from other “dream-pop” bands. In their early press clippings, descriptions like “languid” and “sleepy” turn up, but that’s misleading — their tunes are nothing if not deliberate, even as they move at a patient pace through a delicate mist of phantasmagorical yearnings and soft-focus images.

“We don’t think about everything so much — ours is very much an intuitive process based on feeling and obsession.” This is keyboardist/vocalist Victoria Legrand, and during the course of our e-conversation, she will return to the idea of not overthinking. Perhaps it has to do with the music’s intuitive interface of melancholy and inspiration. Or maybe the serendipity of the duo’s meeting. “I started writing songs when I was 18, but I was always waiting for true inspiration. Meeting Alex was extremely . . . fateful.”

It was fateful for guitarist/vocalist Alex Scally, as well. He’s an adept but unconventional player, and it’s hard to picture his fluid runs and aching slide work fitting in anywhere else. “If my playing has evolved over the years, I’m not sure if it’s been for the better,” he quips, “but the key part of our music is composing together.” Victoria concurs: “We are a yin yang for the most part — except when we’re not getting along.”

Teen Dream was recorded in a converted church/studio called Dreamland (natch) outside Woodstock, New York, and it represents not so much a departure as a marked progression. A cursory listen might give you the impression it’s a concept album dedicated to the journal entries of a poetic teenager. Yet the songs are anything but adolescent — they’re full of mature observational details. The standouts “Silver Soul” and “Real Love” are wistfully romantic, foregrounding both swooning joy and bittersweet regret. “Walk in the Park” is typical: funereal and aching the first time you spin it, but by the 10th or 20th listen, its juxtaposition of calliope chops and graceful chorus fades makes it feel less like a sad pop song and more like a blurry associative memory, a conjuring of the sweetest of fleeting moments lost to time.

Well, as Legrand and Scally say, they don’t like to think about it too much. For Legrand, being able to channel the subconscious via her raspy vocalizing is liberating, in contrast to her early training in the world of opera. From age 14 to 21, she learned to build her voice like a muscle. By the time she met Scally and formed Beach House, she was ready to let her instincts guide her.

“That’s the amazing part of making music,” she notes. “Raw feelings and melody always take different winding roads. They can crash and burn or fly brilliantly.” Fortunately for her, and for us, her indirect style allows her music to do both at once, and gloriously.

Beach House: Boys Meet Girls (Boston Phoenix, 3/23/10)

Dead Can Dance

Much of the press tumult over Beach House has focused on how the duo’s idiosyncratic musical style folds into a surging wave of like-minded indie artists eschewing rock histrionics for a gentler path to the hearts of music listeners — especially as it relates to their long-time association with gravelly indie-rock soothsters Grizzly Bear. But often overlooked is the band’s relationship to a specifically ’80s underground trend: the boy-girl duo. In the ’70s, such duos dominated the smooth seas of soft rock, whether it was the Captain & Tennille, Ashford & Simpson, Peaches & Herb, or the Carpenters. In the ’00s, we saw boy-girl rock duos like the White Stripes and the Raveonettes. Yet Beach House is more ’80s, where oddball duos made music that reflected their own inscrutable relationships, mapping the crags and crevices of their interpersonal dynamic onto the grooves of trend-bucking LPs that in many ways defined the weirdness of their time. Herewith, the four most crucial ’80s post-punk boy-girl duos.

YAZOO | Known to us Yanks as Yaz for legal reasons, the ’Zoo were the stop-gap project for synth-pop pioneer Vince Clarke, his weigh station between Depeche Mode and Erasure. And yet it can be argued that his partnership with Alison Moyet was the most forward-thinking and influential thing he ever did. Upstairs at Eric’s, Yazoo’s classic debut, arrived the same year as the Mode’s Speak and Spell (on which Clarke also worked) but far outpaces it in both dance-floor whump and after-party comedown intimacy. At once paranoid and bittersweet, the music of Yazoo continues to sound more presciently satisfying with each passing year.

DEAD CAN DANCE | An early 4AD signing, DCD took the better part of a decade to morph from the baroque mope pop of Australian transplants slumming it in blighty into world-music magpies. Lead vocalist Lisa Gerrard is perhaps the most sampled vocalist in history, her deep contralto sounding less like vibrations within a human throat than like an unmediated force of nature. Her working relationship with co-founder Brendan Perry has always been rocky, even in DCD’s best of times, but the band’s musical restlessness and self-seriousness drove them to create some of the most gorgeously uncategorizable music ever made.

EURYTHMICS | If it weren’t for MTV, we would probably never have noticed the fascinating chemistry of Scottish frontwoman Annie Lennox and her English producer/collaborator, Dave Stewart. But Lennox’s post-punk confrontational sense of style was given a medium whereby she could use her shock-orange-hair androgyny to ply the band’s mournful weirdness on the proverbial innocent rube in Peoria. Seventy-five million records later, the band’s legacy is secure, with Lennox as a vocal and style icon, and Stewart as an influential producer and musician.

TIMBUK3 | The quirky fluke hit of 1986’s “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades” briefly brought the husband-wife team of Pat and Barbara MacDonald into the limelight. Like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” it became popular in part because its US pop-music audience was unfamiliar with irony. But the millions who bought the band’s debut, Greetings from Timbuk3, expecting more of the same were greeted with pointed political cynicism and socio-political commentary set to a cheap beatbox and a grim country-folk bedrock.

Beach House: MFA, 12/10/08 (Boston Phoenix)

HELLO, DARKNESS: Victoria Legrand was right to ask for less light.

“No, seriously, can you turn them down?” A few songs into their set at the MFA’s Remis Auditorium Friday, Beach House’s Victoria Legrand gave a second, graver plea for less light, and for a moment we wondered what would happen if the lighting guy didn’t comply. It wasn’t exactly bright in the room to begin with, but as the band trudged funereally through their lugubrious dreamscapes, a request of “Let there be less light” made more and more sense.

With shuffling and echoing programmed beats, spindly guitar lines, and keyboards set to haunting pre-sets, each song was like another go-round on a particularly morbid amusement park ride, where voices reverberated longingly and you could see the next part while still hearing the previous one off in the distance. Guitarist Alex Scally’s glistening fingerwork played in conjunction with the slow pulse of the electronic beats and Legrand’s offhandedly eerie lilt, and the songs were delivered like a series of waves, the force cresting and breaking, then slowly subsiding, only to rebuild again at a steady pace.

“Pick apart the past, you’re not going back,” sang Legrand in “Gila” (from 2008′s Devotion), summing up the mood of stunned regret and nonchalant sadness. If you were there to get energized or rocked, you’d have been bored shitless as the band coated the mostly bescarfed crowd with their aural codeine. But if you went to find transcendent hope in a morass of sadness, this performance hit sublime pinnacles that some need drugs to reach.