Occupying a place that few acts can lay claim to in 2022, Beach House make music that demands a listener's time and attention. And perhaps they've not asked for as much as they ask of us with Once Twice Melody, the new album out today on Sub Pop. It's a colossal release, running nearly an hour and a half, and one which seems to come with the sort of expectations we'd bring to Radiohead releases a decade or more ago.
Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally are, of course, not as intent as pushing at the edges of the alt-rock genre form as Yorke and co. But, similarly, they are focused on making something that's enveloping, which asks of us that we hear, like we used to, before music became the noise that plays while we do other things. I think that's admirable, really. And, regardless of what I think of Once Twice Melody, the band gets points for having the chutzpah to serve up something this long, nuanced, and expansive. I mean, there are loads of bands who want to sound like this, but really no one else can quite pull this off the way Legrand and Scally do so consistently.
From the indie bliss of the title cut, to the lovely "Superstar", and to the beautiful "Pink Funeral", things progress nicely, the tunes retaining a focus that this kind of dream pop rarely has. The individual compositions are concise, even as they melt away into the ether at times. "Through Me", for example, works up a modest momentum atop drum samples and percolating rhythmic effects.
And as successful as the start here is, Once Twice Melody is still far too long. I think most albums near the 60-minute mark are, and this is nearly 25 more past that, so it's natural I'd say that. But it's also apparent that things like "New Romance" and "ESP" just don't feel as special as other selections on this monster of a record. It feels at times in the middle of this, that the keyboards are playing the players, you know? There's nothing dreadful, mind you, but momentum is maintained barely in this stretch.
By the time we get to "Another Go Round" things are coalescing again. This one and a few others on Once Twice Melody call to mind Air a bit, though one thinks more of Beach House being the heirs to Broadcast than anyone else. But, like Air, there's a fascination at work here with pop, even if the pop is stretched out until it nearly melts away like a piece of ice under sunlight. That's where Beach House succeed, not as much though on admittedly good stuff like "Masquerade", a lesser number here, but one which other acts would kill for. When they stick to refinements of their own established formula, like on "Illusion of Forever", Beach House manage to make some of the most beautiful indie we're going to hear in 2022. And there's plenty of it here, of course, amidst those detours I described above.
Beach House present a quandry as fans of the duo really want a certain thing from this act. And Once Twice Melody surely delivers. And fans, myself included, bristle a bit when that formula is tampered with, and diversions are pursued. But, for the most part, Once Twice Melody reveals that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have found a way to pump out their sugary brand of dream pop, while carefully expanding the template of the whole undertaking. That the record's too long may be a mater of opinion, as the modest experiments with adjustments to the Beach House method are tolerable if moderately distracting. When things work here, they do so wonderfully, like on sublime closer "Modern Love Stories" with its neat, slow deconstruction of the pieces of the Beach House formula that came before it..
Once Twice Melody is out today via Sub Pop.
[Photos: David Belisle]