Arts & Life, Music

Review: Beach House’s ‘Depression Cherry’

Album: “Depression Cherry”
Artist: Beach House
Label: Sub-Pop Records
Release Date: Aug. 28, 2015
Rating: 4.5/5

The best way to listen to Beach House is at night, darting down the fast lane, with every window open. After the Baltimore duo released their fifth album on Friday, I knew what I had to do.

I took to California Highway 1 at midnight, heading south from Long Beach. The shining orb of a Sturgeon supermoon above me and the tuft surface of the Pacific beside me, I fixed my finger to the play button. Come now reader; settle into the passenger seat, as we barrel down the coast listening to “Depression Cherry.”

In through the speakers comes the initial sustained note of the opening track, aptly titled “Levitation,” which holds you in a state of suspension, imparting something similar to the fluttering feeling just before take off.

“After midnight we could feel it all / I go anywhere you want to / You should see there’s a place I want to take you,” sings Victoria Legrand, and underneath it all the sustained root hums, still promising liftoff. The place is not a place in the ordinary sense of the word: it’s a trance, a hallucination, the deep subconscious.

About halfway through “Levitation” the bottom end comes in, opening up the soundscape and catapulting us into the ether. From here on out, the listener is weightless.


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Lord Byron once wrote on the etymology of the word carnival: “This feast is named the Carnival, which being / Interpreted, implies “farewell to flesh.” And just as Beach House’s sound has always contained the spirit of the steam organs of carnivals past, their music too renders its listeners temporarily bodiless.

Legrand voice is butter soft, ethereal—a pirouetting ribbon through the lush atmosphere created by her keyboard, Alex Scalley’s guitar work and their trademark kitschy drum machine beats. Never before has Legrand’s voice more seamlessly laced into the group’s music as it does on “Depression Cherry.”

The dream-pop darlings have lost some of their innocence, and along the way have woken an affinity for more mournful themes. As the wind jets through the car the nostalgic guitar riff of “Space Song” repeats over and over. It’s repetition and circularity conjures the rewinding of a sweet moment on an old home video, now lost to time.

Though the exalting peaks of “Teen Dream” are mostly absent on this more subdued album, on the standout song “PPP” Scalley’s guitar pushes through the thick chrysalis of sound spooled throughout the song and breaks into a crescendo hurls you to the summit of the album.

On the closing song “Days of Candy” Legrand’s voice submerges and emerges from a choir of voices as it melts back into the infinite. The berceuse-like melody provides a soft landing, an angelic chaperone lowering us back to Earth.

As the album fades to a close, we find ourselves at a red light on a desolate highway, engine rumbling and reality regaining its hold.

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