Well played, Beach House. I gotta admit, you never called Depression Cherry your “serious” return to form. Surreptitiousness in marketing is a bit of an understatement.
You know I dove right in when I noticed it wasn’t more Teen Droppings. The woozy Lower Dens influence on the vocal was a nice touch too, truth is sometimes best coated in imposture. Nobody’s rejecting your imposture, either, Victoria Legrand; we’d rather hear cosmic abstraction than truth. I don’t want bite sized reality sitting on my placemat, I want a Kawasaki sound vibe… it’s my soma as I zig zag through mazes of people every day, who are also after the same sound vibe rations.
So show us what you don’t know, we ask of you, and that’s what you do, taking refuge under flying two-by-fours of keyboard and guitar, the construction of your “soul,” if “soul” is something “sold,” more that grade A china white we first got on “Gila” than anything overarching and existentially ingenuous, like say A.C. Newman. Cocaine wouldn’t do, even if it was Whitney Houston grade, we needed that china white.
So displaced as we were, who were we to think we knew the real you? Or maybe the point is that we shouldn’t care in the first place, who the real you is. I mean after all, the draw of your music, the reason it was gilded so clandestinely within the “indie” zeitgeist of the ’00’s, was that it didn’t care — it made its living reveling in sweet nonchalance and smiling serenity.
On Teen Dream, you fell in love a little more, but you fell in love with the everyman — again, Kierkegaard’s view of the “soul,” everything in life that isn’t lust, isn’t physical. Without those songs, the grand, clean production of the album wouldn’t have worked, but in the end, they warranted it, in fact required it.
If anything, I think Teen Dream is more indicative of “depression” than either of these two 2015 installments. Maybe the recent album title was Alex’s idea. I see nothing else but depression which could have spawned that much truth — that much cloudy rain upon umbrellas, upon empty steel blue stadium bleachers, optimistic messages to solidify the entire mitigated project. And now as bamboo gardens “bloom” out and become more intricate, we look still to you to jag our deadened senses of reality, and show us how little you care about such things, while having found satisfaction elsewhere, on a higher level.
The duo of Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars is an inseparable tandem, a dichotomy composed of two roles — the wrapping, and the candy. And dammit if I didn’t pay for just the wrapping here, lunging for that sensory overload, mistaking one thing for the other.