I bought a limited edition copy of this album on vinyl and it didn’t glow in the dark. On the upside, while I was trekking through the city with this album in tow, I ran into someone who said I looked like a Beach House fan and I told her she did too.
Beach House makes that kind of music: slightly romantic but not sappy, perfect in its quietude, its placidity. It’s not for everyone and it does kind of need you to be in a specific mood. In college, I had this album on repeat nightly and my roommate did not even complain all that much. The criticism levelled most often against Beach House is that very fact: it’s inoffensiveness is supposedly its downfall.
What is the spirit of Beach House? What does listening to Beach House inspire in us? It promises good fortune, it reminds us of Lao Tzu’s three Great Treasures: compassion, modesty and frugality. Yes, reckoning is due, yes, we’re forever carried forward and pushed towards our futures and our strivings and our dreams call us on while our failures and memories hold us back but it’s all escapable. There is no harm in temporary escape.
Yes, this kind of music has been done before and yes Beach House is not exactly breaking new ground in their own career on Bloom but this is their sound at its most polished. It’s a rainy afternoon in a foreign city, it’s the embers of a Nat Sherman rekindling a dying fire. It’s a cast hexagram that predicts tranquillity through progress.
It’s the feeling that sometimes taking a break is not reclining. Bloom is an album for lovers, is an album for getting lost in, a backdrop to a harmony or a harmony for a backdrop. An outlet, an escape – a beautiful veld to get lost in.
