Although all the most important people are nineteen and our emotions are in check sometimes but sometimes they aren’t, I’ll try not to fall in love with the first cute girl I’ve met.

I’ll try and I’ll fail and then try again and escape the negligent love which has us still searching, always sober, always aching, always heading towards mass suicide, occult figurines.

Indeed, all of Elephant 6 and all the bands I’ve never heard of or have heard of but never heard but still enough to name-drop, they all have a certain similarity – which does not mean they are individually unique, but rather they are part of a certain unique brotherhood. It’s for the best.

And even as we head for the worst, our worst is still far better than other’s best and that is not something that makes me feel compassion, but rather a certain hollow self-satisfaction because just because I’m better (off) than a lot of people doesn’t necessarily mean I’m satisfied with that as I’m never truly satisfied because I never ever settle but that spells out ‘unhappiness’ in blood in the snow because never settling means never being satisfied and that leads to other things because if you’re not satisfied, you’re not happy but you are intelligent and maybe I’d rather be sober and aching than inebriated and dulled because dulled means boring and I’m never boring because I’m so multi-faceted but that also means I’m diluted.

And no one is as special as they think they are and even the most special snowflakes melt. Is love worth living for or is living worth it if we find our lover? Come on chemicals.

And so we get up, push ourselves up and force ourselves to get out of the putrid warmth and faux comfort that we have grown accustomed to. There are still shadows of the things we loved here – but the real things are long gone. The things that remain are just reflections. And so we go because we know we must and we say…

Goodbye lovers and friends. And even if things have gotten a little stale, like living in the same neighborhood you’ve grown up since you were just a little child – it’s still more than a little sad and hard to go, to not turn around just one more time. And you know full-well that you will never ever return.

This is a band in transition, this is a band that’s just finding their footing for the first time. This is essentially the very beginning.

I’ve been following the efforts of Olle Corneer, Stefan Engblom and co. for quite a bit now, and this is their first real cohesive effort, which in itself is admirable. The mainstream electrohouse genre is not something that usually lends itself to full album efforts, and yet here we are.

Does the album hold its own for its entirety? Of course not, but it tries. Amongst super-hits like Kick Out the Epic Motherfucker, Feed the Dada, and Rolling Stones T-Shirt, we find a full album’s worth of house which naturally gets grating. But keeping in mind that the band is not meant to be taken seriously and the fact that this is still more listenable than similar efforts from entirely too serious bands like Daft Punk, this isn’t half-bad for the genre.

Commendable.

And what are the rules of dada, just for the record?
* Never bring your brain to a rave.
* Doing the ‘airpiano’ on stage while looking up in the air? Never.
The ‘heart sign’ with both of your hands?
FUCK NO.
* Tickle-punch-tickle-combo. Happy Violence!
* Cheating is winning.
* If you’re stuck, there’s only one solution: go harder.
* If you only need one word to describe a song in the studio…then it’s done!
* No bananas on the rider? Then we do our two hour deep/tech house set. Everything under 118 BPM.
* PLUR = Potassium Lust Unity Rage
* Arriving beautiful – leaving ugly.
* Beautiful music = boring music. At least today.
* Never BBQ before a gig.
* If you don’t want to get wet, you don’t want to have fun.
* Bass don’t cry.
* Changing underwear at the club is cheating. Even for the members of Dada Life.
* Never bring your brain into the club.
* Art should be loud as fuck.

Noted.

A sophomore slump is derivative but in a fashion of a poor facsimile, in the sense of a slow but definite declining. To start, compare Intro to Angels. The first is an absolute triumph, an appropriate introduction to the band for many, and something that is so significant that it stands both as a start to a gorgeous album and also as a monolithic creation, a testament to their own talent of minimalism. On the other hand, Angels is not only a poor start to an album, it would not even have stood out on their début, effervescent as it attempts to be, it ends up falling flat. However, the question is whether this was a singular and temporal failure or rather an indicator of what is to come.

The next duo of songs attempts to argue in favor of the latter, as it defends The xx of the first album. It is original, it is inventive, it is artistic and yet it still subtly meanders, not quite hitting the previous peaks. However, on Coexist, Chained and Fiction feel like standouts, utter benchmarks of artistic innovation. Objectively however, these are anything but.

Whereas on xx, the music swelled and burst, crescendoing beautifully, here the music is only swill, the weak, overused grounds of the remnants of coffee after the real cup has already been made. Reunion is a wonderful example of the defining feeling of the album, that is of a sub-par follow-up, a true residue or remnant of what has already happened, what has already been made. Sunset attempts to counter that feeling but it is again only a brief respite to the same familiar emotion which is screaming, “This has already happened and last time this was better.”

Disappointment abounds, but the worst part is that the album isn’t even independently terrible. The xx still makes somewhat interesting music and the atmosphere is still there in spades. However, the band’s own past triumphs are precisely what dooms this albums. In essence, if I want to listen to The xx, why wouldn’t I listen to the far superior first album? Is it natural for our lives to peak and then to seem like everything we do is descending in importance, in meaning? Unfortunately that’s possible and it’s likely that the feeling would pervade everything even if the things we were doing were still remarkable. That’s just the way the world works; this is the reason that people making 300k a year in the sunny parts of the world can still be highly dissatisfied and not feel that their remarks are objectively outlandish. Objectivism isn’t real because what the fuck is the point of a Patek Phillipe if I am surrounded by A. Lange & Söhne wearers? Incidentally, it feels that The xx could appreciate the works of the great German masters. They are too devoted to minimalism. Why gerrymander if you can win regardless? Tradition?

Yes this is a flight of fancy, an Icarus again; but what are the options? It’s best to be bathed in golden sunshine even for an instant, then to eternally crawl the earth. Fucking bloom and burst and die and let live, but never claim to be sad when nothing of substance occurs for you in your entire life and suddenly it’s all over at 81 when it should have ended at a third of that. It’s a hollow play, but sometimes the first act is self-contained. If that is so, then my birthday in a few days bookends the second act of my life, the great tumultuous development and build, and the third act with the high action and the final dénouement is to come.

Now that’s exciting, in a way that this album cannot be. Perhaps instead of succumbing to the temptation of attempting to write the same successful album again they should have written about the struggles of what it means to try to replicate your success. In essence, a successful story about replication without replication of success. But it was never The xx’s forte to be convoluted, and thus just like any minimalist they are eventually doomed to replicate themselves. And that’s why this was inevitable.

Somewhere, sometime, somehow, we left behind our dreams, our aspirations, our hope for something good. Our naivete and our belief that people are inherently good are there somewhere, present even still, but only as a reminder, a mocking testament to our trials and our failures.

And yet sometimes, we reach for the past and we think of the times when we hadn’t failed and we remember the times before everything had changed and before everything meant everything. That’s when we remember what is used to be like and through regret we sigh for the old times, the times we sought to abandon when they were happening.
While we grow up, we seek nothing more than to be older; but when we’re older, we just want to recapture our youth.

And the definition of youth is not the lack of wrinkles, the lack of experience and it is not the joyful abandon, it’s not the consequence free romps. It’s all that but it’s something else.

It is innocence.

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.