Beach House

I recall an I Love Music thread dedicated to artists who fleshed out entire careers from one particular song. With such diversions in mind: Beach House = Spacemen 3’s “Feel So Sad.” The Baltimore duo’s sophomore release features the same blissful inertia, lyrical melancholia, and layered reverb and echo-tinged organs and guitars. But while Spaceman 3’s Jason Pierce’s numbers always left the listener with a touch of uneasiness, as the reasons for his despair were typically junk-related, the members of Beach House look at one another and draw inspiration from a sort of conceptualized love (the pair, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, are not romantically involved). “So we’ll still have the summers / Let’s be good to one another,” Legrand reminds on “All the Years.” “Wedding Bell” is an homage to domestic bliss/blahs, Legrand’s electric harpsichord and Scally’s slide guitar slow-dancing in the background. Vocally, Legrand is as supine as they come, but doesn’t allow Devotion to descend into indolence, as she occasionally picks herself off the floor and brushes away the dust bunnies—like the stern warning “Don’t you waste your time” from “Gila” and the playful vocal melody on the choruses in “Turtle Island.”