By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
Beach House’s slow melodies and ethereal lyrics are filled with mysterious, "Holy Moments," captured in simple couplets, like “Pick apart the past, you’re not going back / So don’t you waste your time," surrounded by atmospheric, somber, lightly strung-together pearly words that create a tone reminiscent of a short I saw on Friday, Footnotes to a House of Love, directed by Laida Lertxundi, at Artists’ Television Access.
Set in the desert of Southern California, the 16-mm color film is a collection of collaged cuts of empty dilapidated wooden rooms, loosely hanging screen doors, and parallel views of lovers caressing. The chopped scenes fuse together to create a sense of place that is more fulfilling than any individual shot, much like the sentiment that Beach House captures.
This mood is similar to the manner in which Beach House’s meditative melodies wash over their audience, as they did Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Swedish American Music Hall. If you’ve ever felt heartbroken, or any moderate pain at all, you can interpret Beach House’s abstract lyrics filled with mild images - “I’ll pour some tea for us” ("Astronaut") - stuck somewhere in nostalgia (or maybe in the imagined future), and suit them to fit your own emotional state at the time.
Indulgent, but also comforting, Beach House creates a spacey, tenuous mood that absorbed the sitting woolgathers at the show. Widely known for choosing smaller venues to keep consistent this celestial captivation of their audience, the group succeeded once again with an audience that was clearly familiar with all their tracks; shouting out requests for songs, and responding to guitarist-vocalist Victoria Legrand’s “You’re a great audience,” with, “We love you, too.”
Looking somewhat like Disney’s Country Bears, minus the hick-thing and speaking-mounted moose heads, but similarly set up in front of a red velvet carpet Legrand lithely sings and plays the keyboard, Alex Scally seriously and delicately plays slide on the guitar, and a third musician, Graham, takes on the shaker and drums. The three remained focus throughout the show, talking during breaks. Legrand made jokes after sipping her red wine, “What does a snail say on the back of a turtle?” And a member from the audience shouted out the correct answer, “Wheeee.”
Legrand’s voice, classically trained and it shows, is one of the highlights of the band. Occasionally she is compared to Nico - this is not entirely fitting, but there is a resemblance in the way in which notes are sung, strong as they trail off into the distance, effecting, without sounding affected, with an intangible, almost futuristic feeling of weightlessness. Woeful as always, she hit perfectly the “Ooh"'s on “Gila,” but with the feeling that her voice was clearly worn out. It occasionally cracked and sounded like the slow hiss of an old cast iron radiator.
The show was not flawless – beyond the cracking of the voice, an occasional moment of nail-scratching feedback slightly shattered the quiet of the show. But those imperfections seemed to suit the inherent juxtapositions in many of their songs, which speak of both the importance of remembering and of forgetting and show honest emotion while indulging in lullaby-love.
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