Beach House - Bloom

2010’s Teen Dream was a colossal leap forward from what we’d previously heard from Beach House. Preserving the dream-like quality of their lauded nostalgia-laced ruminations, the duo refined their processes, tightened their structures and sharpened their melodies in comparison to the looser mood-piece feel of 2008’s (equally excellent in its own way) Devotion - a move which paid off to excellent effect. Hearing Teen Dream for the first time was enrapturing; a catalogue of quiet revelations - Legrand’s hooks hitting straight between the eyes with a previously unheard confidence, bolstered by a newfound clarity within the shimmering arrangements. Bloom, on the other hand, marks the first plateau in Beach House’s trajectory - not necessarily conceding a quasi-objective drop in quality, but undoubtedly signalling a stasis in their evolution; an album which sounds cut from exactly the same cloth as its predecessor.

There was strong indication of this with early preview ‘Myth’, a song which felt like slipping back into a warm bath, another dose of the velvety Teen Dream indulgence fans were aching for. Next we were treated to ‘Lazuli’ - an example of what a Beach House greatest hits compilation would sound like if distilled into a five minute package: a tinny beat and twinkling arpeggio giving rise (blooming, if you’ll forgive me) into a breathy cacophony of intertwined music-box vocal melodies. Luxurious and smoky as these morsels undoubtedly were, once the initial pleasure of having Beach House back had worn off, the unwelcome realisation hits: we’ve heard this before. Sticking with their well worn blueprint of mid-tempos and sweeping, languid melodies, tracks like ‘New Year’ and ‘On The Sea’ now sound featureless and drab - a foot in each boat between the aching melancholy of Devotion and the pop vitality of Teen Dream, achieving the heights of neither.

Ironically for a band with such a penchant for ostensible backward-gazing and repetition, Bloom’s insistence on occupying the same ground as Teen Dream marks the first disappointment of Beach House’s career. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have (quite rightly) played the last record to death by now, and a new album which plays like a collection of offcuts and flipsides to Teen Dream’s fresh ground doesn’t make for a satisfying follow up. Exactly where I wanted Beach House to go, I couldn’t tell you (although the conclusion of ‘Irene’ makes me wonder what might come of engaging more closely with the drone and dissonance elements at the peripheries of their sound). But what I can say with certainty is that they should have continued going somewhere. As is the nature of nostalgia, if you actually return to what you were yearning for, what you remember making you so happy the first time, another go around on the carousel is cripplingly unfulfilling - a sad reality which ultimately leaves Bloom sounding like a hollow repetition, a cold echo, a contender for Miss Favisham’s favourite album.