Sometimes these days I feel like the only time I swing through these pages is when I’m violently ditching something at you with the triumphant cry of ‘LOVE THIS LIKE I LOVE YOU’ (see Mob, Glitch and Buttons, Fuck). Which is part of the point of blogs I guess, but I do worry that you may construe my reckless effusion as being insincere. I assure you, it’s not. This has just been a good few months for music. That, and I FUCKING LOVE EVERYTHING.

But, ironic exaggeration aside, ‘Teen Dream’, the new Beach House album, is just… stunning. Really stunning. It’s not due out until late January next year and already it’s jockeying for my best album of 2009/2010 (leaks make for hazy ranking periods). I enjoyed their first major offering, ‘Devotion’, but had found it a little too wintry and sleepy overall, like the sole intention of the name ‘Beach House’ was to make a joke out of the album itself. It was beautifully produced certainly, and signposted a lot of the elements that make ‘Teen Dream’ such a profound pleasure, but in the end I found myself reducing the album down to being merely sleeping music. A role it filled very well, but in retrospect this may have been an ignominious end for quite a remarkable record.

Not so with ‘Teen Dream’, with which I’m willing to say Beach House may well have turned in the crucial album of this summer. Whereas ‘Devotion’ seemed to traffic in rain-drenched waves and overcast holidays, ‘Teen Dream’ coasts on hungover and hot Saturday mornings, lazy Sunday beers and summer girls. It’s like Delorean made a special effort to get his glum mate out of the dumps and inadvertently caused him to produce the best music of his life. Whereas once Beach House drifted from track to track, covering their songs in a monochromatic, icy blur, now they soar towards their choruses, each song an expression of some new-found confidence and optimism. The album title is indicative too; ‘Teen Dream’ owes a lot more to the nostalgic, John Hughes-tinged optimism of ‘Saturdays=Youth’-M83 than it does Atlas Sound (which may be a patchy comparison, but I discovered the two at the same time and they share a certain resonance in my mind). Although fans of their previous work will still be able to wallow in the familiar array of fuzzed out edges and tentative sentiment; despite this shift toward dreamwave/glo-fi/et al, the sonic template and songwriting aesthetic has remained largely stable.

The end result is a lush, gauzey and gorgeous album, filled with gentle crescendos and vocals of velvet softness. It’s music that you want to backstroke lazily around as you flirt awkwardly with the girls you used to love. The kind of songs that make you see your life as a film recorded entirely in Super-8, filled with dull lighting and hipster asides. Music containing the cautious optimism of your teen years and suffused with the occasional longing you have to feel that strongly and abruptly once again. An album that will prompt you to write as pretentiously as those past few sentences look on the re-read. Yikes. But all this and more awaits you when you listen to Beach House’s brilliant new album ‘Teen Dream’ (especially the pretension). It’s available on January 26th, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with my primary obsession from the record, the gloriously restrained anthem ‘Walk in a Park’. The song itself is beautiful enough – and certainly showcases Beach House’s new attachment to the world of major chords and semi-traditional songwriting – but when the final climax kicks in, you suddenly find the song recast in shimmering euphoria and endless longing and you begin to realise that you might actually be listening to something quite remarkable. Which the entire album is. Do keep your eyes out for it. I guarantee you, it will define your summers.*

Beach House – Walk In The Park

-luke

* Really, really, really not a guarantee