Beach House: Devotion
Carpark
2008
Rating:


Beach House's "Devotion" is as fragile as a yearning heart tautened from desperate pulsing and delicate from the fear of unreciprocated love. This album is lovelorn, and rapturously so, but wrapped in the melancholy that sometimes comes with such romantic dedication. Beach House has perfected the sound of romantic haunting in much the same way Daphne du Maurier did with "Rebecca." Amazingly, the duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally accomplish this with little more than Legrand's ethereal voice, a slide guitar, a Casiotone keyboard synthesizer beat set on repeat and some stray auxiliary percussion.

"You Came to Me" unfolds over a Bosa Nova sequence that appropriately brings to mind an Oceanside resort, but Legrand weighs down what could've been a wispy triviality with her lugubrious intonation of, "This is the right time for a haunting." "The Wedding Bell" is the ghost of a country & western jaunt on which Legrand movingly asks, "Oh, is your heart still mine to sail?"

"Gila" has a more powerful backbeat and seers with menace. Legrand sounds more love jaded as she sings "Don't you waste your time" and Scally expresses danger with his guitar. "D.A.R.L.I.N.G." is more Motown devotional than Nico icy cool, just one step from a stripped down Ronnie Spector.

Fittingly, "Heart of Chambers" is the heart of the album. A desperate waltz of heartache, there is real pain and real hopefulness to the melancholy dirge and Legrand's impassioned plea of, "I'd like to / Be someone / You could finally learn to / Love again." That despair, that desire is the very essence of devotion.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/archives/001060.php