Beach House: Bloom

By Alif Omar Mahfix  •  in Review
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Even though Beach House has reached their peak with Teen Dream, clearly that wasn’t the point when they would feel complacent by acclaim and self-fulfilment. Bloom sees the band going beyond the critical fulfilment of that record to their own self-actualisation as a band. While they didn’t wander too far away from the structure and emotionality of the previous LP, they certainly did some surgically précised adjustments to the formula – proving that a working formula can be tempered and improved upon.

Band members French-born Victoria Legrand and Baltimore native Alex Scally are far from being anywhere near teenhood anymore, but Bloom is much like and unlike Teen Dream in that it is ripe with post-teen pathos that is indistinguishable from teen angst, which is an inevitable staple of dream pop we suppose. For example the best song off the album, ‘Wild’, is a lost teen cliché that still manages to muster empathy from us; singing dreamily “our father won’t come home…”

Nothing is new under the sun, it is the execution that impresses us. Perhaps that is what post-teen pathos is anyway; a nostalgic feeling. In Victoria Legrand’s own words, it’s “the moment when a memory aches” (as sung on ‘Wishes’). And that is exactly what Bloom conjures, blooming nostalgia – a sort of tribute to teenhood.

LISTEN TO: ‘Wishes’, ‘Wild’, ‘Troublemaker’
IF YOU LIKE THIS YOU’LL DIG: Twin Sister, Grizzly Bear, Real Estate
RATING: 3.5

www.beachhousebaltimore.com