You won’t mistake Beach House for anyone else. Over the past 10 years, the duo have perfected a sound which is wholly their own.
That soft, woozy, infectious and melancholic wave of sound is their trademark, every jot as identifiable as any logo you’d care to mention. Beach House may recalibrate and refine their sound on every outing, but their dream-pop sweep of echoey guitars, haunting organ and soft-shuffle vocals always reigns supreme.
There’s a reason for this, says Alex Scally, and that’s because he and bandmate Victoria Legrand always approach the job of writing new material in the same manner.
“In some ways, we’re very limited as a band by how we work,” he explains. “We don’t try to do anything different. We just do what we’ve always done.
“We start with a drum beat or a chord progression or a melody that is really exciting to us. We keep playing it and we let the inspiration take us where it wants to go. The main thing is to be natural with what happens. When something becomes formulaic, it loses that power.”
Cherry bomb
The Baltimore duo's releases certainly possess a power. Tracks on albums like Devotion and Teen Dream resonate with a dulcet, mesmerising chemistry. It's a quality which you'll find on this year's Depression Cherry, a record where the songs possess a slow-motion groove which slowly hooks and seduces the listener. Such power and chemistry are also part of the allure of Thank Your Lucky Stars, the surprise new Beach House album released this week.
“Repetition can be an interesting experience for a band,” says Scally. “The more you repeat something, the more you begin to hear things you’d never noticed before.”
Another reason for Beach House’s sound may well be the fact that it’s the two of them and no one else. “I enjoy limitations and it has been the key to how me and Victoria work,” says Scally. “If you’ve only two sets of hands, it really governs how you write and, for me, it makes everything more essential. You could write something really elaborate and involved, but you’d have to have nine people onstage to play it and that’s not going to work for us.”
The band are currently touring, and Scally says some interesting conundrums have already emerged around their most recent album. “We’re in a process right now to try to work out which songs from the previous albums will go with songs from the new album to make the night feel like it makes sense rather than jumping all over the place. We’ve played 10 shows so far and some nights it’s really good and some nights it feels really awkward.
“We’re working out which songs have which feelings so we can create a set that feels natural to us and therefore feels natural to the audience. It’s the first time we’ve ever had this problem where it feels difficult to combine the music from all five albums.”
What Beach House want the live shows to do is tell a story. “When I say telling a story, I mean less in the straight narrative sense and more an emotional story where the energy fields and moods of all the songs take a very natural and beautiful course and are not pushed together. It’s almost like a mixtape.”
For Scally, touring is a time to concentrate on the job in hand and block out all other distractions.
The business of show
“Touring is both a very chaotic time and a very beautiful time of bonding. When you’re on tour, your primary goal every day becomes very simple and focused and that’s to make the show happen. The secondary goals involve feeding yourself and maybe cleaning yourself. It’s very different to being home and recording. It feels incredibly simple and you forget everything else outside. I actually forget the world’s problems. I stop reading the news and thinking about the world.
“The aim is to get the gear into the venue, set it up, soundcheck, have something to eat, go onstage and, if we’re lucky, go to a bar before getting back on the bus, going to sleep and doing it again tomorrow. In regular life, there are so many more choices you have to contend with, like ‘where am I going to go tonight?’ or ‘how am I going to spend the weekend?’. When you’re on tour, there’s no choice so it is kind of monastic. You take away choice and you have this hugely gratifying task of having to make something beautiful happen every night.”
But the real world does sometime rear its head and that means taking care of business. For Scally, this means ensuring everyone else knows how Beach House want to be represented to the world.
“I understand the need to think about the business stuff and we understand the need to communicate with people to make sure fans come to our shows and check out the new record,” he says.
“But we also think about the business a lot because we want to make sure our label are not presenting us in a way that we find inaccurate. For us, it’s like wearing a different hat. It’s not so much a business-minded side of us as a protective side. We want to protect what we’ve made and make sure it doesn’t get abused in any way. It’s not fun, but we’re lucky to be doing this for a living and there should be something which is hard work in there.”
Vital organs
Home for Beach House is Baltimore. “The main thing Baltimore has given us is freedom,” says Scally. “We’ve been able to have a huge practice space in what is not a super-expensive city surrounded by lots of fantastic musicians. There’s also never been any pressure to be anything.
“If we’d lived in other cities and didn’t have as much space or freedom, I wonder would we have been pushed into certain trends and types of music because we couldn’t play out loud like we do at present? What would it be like if we had to write and rehearse and record wearing headphones which is what many people who write and play in their apartments on computers have to do? Also, what would happen to all the organs that we have? We have tons of organs because we have the space to keep them in. But you’d need a time machine to see what would happen in that case.”
- Beach House release their new album, Thank Your Lucky Stars, on Bella Union today. They play Belfast's Mandela Hall on October 24th and Dublin's Vicar Street on October 25th, 2015
