Victoria LeGrand is the key to Beach House and I think on this album for the first time they have figured out a sound that works across an album to highlight her voice. LeGrand is one of those female singers with a deep husky voice that invokes a rainy fall evening mood. Think of singers like Martha Davis of The Motels or Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde and you have a good sense of the vocal stylings of LeGrand.On this latest album from Beach House they have gone all in with the mood set so naturally by LeGrand's voice and have created a beautiful and haunting album. This makes me question why you would release the album at the beginning of summer and not at the beginning of fall, but I guess it will fit in well with those youthful depressed summer evenings. Still this album fits in perfectly with cloudy, cold, rainy weather and actually seems to thrive off of such a setting.
At $5 from Amazon this album is a steal and if it were back in the day I would recommend any friend of mine to pick it up if we stumbled across it for that price in a record store. This may be the best Beach House can ever do, and that won't be a bad thing. The only thing missing here are individual songs that will find their way onto your best of list for the month or the year, but I can honestly see this being an album that I would turn to at different times in my life for the rest of my life and that's saying something.
Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 3 out of 5 stars for Pretty Good.
Certainly this song could've been pouring out of my 1984 Buick Skylark windows along about the time I would've been cutting speed to within 10 of the limit on the Western Kentucky Parkway near the KSP station at Mortons Gap.
ReplyDeleteEver since I wrote this review I've been thinking about The Motels and Concrete Blonde.
ReplyDeleteAnd that led me to think of this song.
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