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Baltimore duo Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, who record as Beach House, have perfected a genre unto themselves which you might call “love songs for ghosts.” Songs drift by in a haze nudged along by dusty drum machine beats, Scally’s sleepy guitar figures, and Legrand’s glassy organ playing and hypnotic vocals, which could be described as melodramatic if they sounded like they were produced by a living person. The songs on Beach House’s self-titled debut album give the impression that they’re sinking into some dark corner of your memory even as you listen to them. While essentially built from the same parts, their new album Devotion is full of immediate arrangements and attention-grabbing melodies, and the beautifully lo-fi production aesthetic of Beach House has been upgraded to studio-quality crispness. It’s a greater album for all that, though no less mournful—the loping, countrified swirl of opener "Wedding Bells" rides a narcotic lope of a drumbeat that sounds like a stoned horse falling down a flight of stairs, and it’s the most propulsive thing they’ve ever recorded. Legrand's addled croon on "Gila" and the chorus of ghostly disembodied vocals at the end of “Turtle Island” are the aural equivalent of someone walking over your grave. Highly recommended.
Those of us old enough to remember Stephen Malkmus sarcastically bleating the word “career” over and over back in ’94 may approach Malkmus’ solo material with slightly more trepidation than the kids who think of him as the '90s answer to Lou Reed. Like Reed, Malkmus is so viciously talented that his legendary tenure in Pavement tended to obscure the contributions of his bandmates, whereas his lone wolf years have seen that very talent obscured by epic self-indulgence and outright banality. Unfortunately, both feature prominently on Real Emotional Trash, Stephen’s new album with his band, The Jicks. Simply put, the album has a bad case of jamcephalitis— songs hit the three minute mark and then spin off into extended instrumental segments of no real consequence. Malkmus has been headed in this direction since 2004's Pig Lib, but whereas the extended guitar solos on that album felt like a revelation of previously obscured talent, the last two records just sound poorly edited. The forced whimsy of tunes like "Hopscotch Willie,” delivered in the same nasally croon Malkmus has used since his 20s, don’t help. There are moments good enough to make the album’s overall aimlessness particularly trying: the soulful sway of the title track, the slow-burning crawl of opener “Dragonfly Pie.” The moody ballad "Out Of Reaches,” with its references to "gale force intimacy" and emotional tides turning, prove that Malkmus still has a way with words, or rather words that connote actual ideas, and his guitar playing is as inventively melodic as ever. Could be that he just wants to put out an instrumental record.
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