At this point, it seems like Beach House’s career is pretty much over, at least in the sense of anyone caring about it. As should be known to anyone who reads this site, Sub Pop was very instrumental in killing it: granted, they “killed” it by making it sterile, like dumping a bunch of chlorine in someone’s breakfast cereal, or whatever, if that counts for anything.
This is all the more reason, anyway, to hotly debate which album is their best. I vote for Devotion (2008), personally, which proudly harks back to their Carpark [1] days, what’s more.
The classics careen off of Devotion like orchid petals — my favorites off of the top of my head are “Gila”; “Holy Dances”; “D.A.R.L.I.N.G.” and “Home again.” For this post, though, I’m focusing on “Heart of Chambers”; and reasons have to do, specifically, with lyrics.
As is a general trend with this band, and, for this reason, to fully be encouraged, romance and amorousness formulate the primary topic of the lyrics to “Heart of Chambers.” Legrand is addressing a prospective love interest, using charming language that strikes a nice balance between metaphoric and approachable. The stanza I’m particularly interested in contains the lines “I’d like to be someone / You could finally learn to love again / …We’ve put our woes / Down by our sides / Let’s take the time / To mend these smiles / Together we could make it home / Love is a prize / Live our own lie”.
And it’s funny: I’ve heard this song probably a hundred times, but only just today or yesterday did portions of Legrand’s rhetoric here start to strike me as curious. I mean, it seems like a sexy come-on to most of us guys, so we’re more likely just to start drooling and smiling than actually analyze this stuff.
Something gave me the cold enough consciousness, though, recently, and I started unpacking it, in my mind. I started to consider that maybe this “mend(ing)” of “smiles” could constitute what could make an eventual breakup so anguishing. Is it worse to lose one you loved if, beforehand, you’d been fully intact and yourself, or if you’d been a wreck to begin with?
It then dawned on me that, perhaps, Legrand, instead of being earnest when she mentions that they’ll “mend these smiles”, is actually fabricating this as a way of absolving herself of her own guilt she’s felt in breaking guys’ hearts in the past, in ending a relationship when she just, inexplicably, isn’t feeling it anymore. If she does this to a man (and I don’t, mind you, mean to place any blame on her here) and he was a myopic, sort of incomplete individual from the start, then she didn’t even do anything that bad.
I think we all know, though, that we men are complete beings, and, in romance, this is what the woman steals from us, not by any guile of her own, but just by the natural universal law of dating. An inquiry into her lyrical strategy here would certainly be interesting, regarding things like whether this has been a past discourse in her dating style, or if it’s just kind of a one-off, tongue-in-cheek concept she invented just for this song. Intriguingly, anyway, this whole message is beautiful, despite the fact of its very fraudulence, and if you think I’m going to make an analgous generalization about women here, then, you’re just reading the wrong site — that’s all there is to it. Go check old back issues of Kreem.
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[1] Carpark is a little novelty sort of indie label based out of D.C. that furnished Beach House’s charming, primitive early work.
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