Devotion and Teen Dream will always remind me of the anxiety I felt as I made the leap from high school to college two years later, Bloom came about just as I was feeling restless and wondering what to do next. Because of that nature, they become intrinsically tied to moments in your own life. They come along every two years or three, claims for your unwanted baggage. They’re sweeping, broad swaths of emotion for the listener to project their feelings onto. It is an album that can only be described as another instant Beach House classic.So far, all of Beach House’s albums have required you to give up a part of yourself to fully appreciate them. When you look back through their catalogue, what you see are expertly forged, extremely emotive songs that all complement the band’s common vision, and Thank Your Lucky Stars is, of course, no deviation from this pattern. They have figured out and worked extremely diligently to stay true to their sound since their self-titled debut in 2006. What really stands out when you try to compare Thank Your Lucky Stars and this summer’s Depression Cherry is the fact that so much of their latest release feels so essentially Beach House. Though the reverb has been dialed back somewhat on Thank Your Lucky Stars, they still know when to soak a song in it. Similarly, “All Your Yeahs,” the third track, is a more minimalistic song that feels as if it were recorded in a giant cathedral. “Common Girl” is a paired down waltz number with more complicated keyboards than you hear on a lot of their other work. The same can be said of finale track “Somewhere Tonight,” a song that sounds heavily influenced by doo-wop chord changes and arrangement, as does the expansive seventh track “Elegy to the Void.” With each track, you find another instantly catchy keyboard line or guitar riff. Both the album’s second track, “She’s So Lovely,” and the sixth track, “The Traveller,” relish in the the somber nature of their work and their close attention to melodic hooks. The “essential Beach House sound” penetrates the entire album. “Majorette” starts with a lone drum beat that expands into the arpeggiated guitar playing, the orchestral chords and Legrand’s dulcet voice that make up the Beach House ethos. Thank Your Lucky Stars opens with a track which feels like a quintessential Beach House song that could fit in perfectly with previous releases Teen Dream or Bloom. Each melody, the sounds of the backing drums, the subtle fuzzed out guitar riffs that hide in the background of many of the tracks, each line sung has been perfected. You can hear the careful thought that went into writing each song. Like so much of their previous work, each track feels intensely labored over. We can all be thankful that wasn’t true and Beach House are back doing what they do best: crafting extremely emotive songs built around lilting keyboard hooks that impress with their seeming simplicity and Legrand’s cloudy vocals underpinned by Alex Scally’s impeccable, purposeful guitar licks. Legrand also seemed to feel almost completely drained creatively, stating in an interview, “I didn’t feel creative at all…I just thought well, maybe I’ll never have another musical thought.” After the release of Bloom in 2012, they took a short break, mostly due to the fact that they were unhappy with their sound touring with a live drummer. It is important, as the band has pointed out, not to view Thank Your Lucky Stars as a “companion to Depression Cherry, or a surprise, or b-sides.” Although it was recorded in the same sessions as Depression Cherry, the album has a wholly different feel and certainly stands apart from their previous release.īeach House, particularly the French born singer/keyboardist Victoria Legrand, have always taken great care to protect their vision and the integrity of the band in general. With amazingly short notice, the album comes only a few months after their fifth studio album, Depression Cherry. Just nine days before its release, Beach House announced that they would be putting out their sixth studio album, Thank Your Lucky Stars.
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