By Sami Abou-Mayaleh
Heartbeat – reminiscent drums, morose and unending synthesizer notes, and heavenly vocals radiate through Beach House’s newest album, “Thank Your Lucky Stars.”
After releasing their fifth album, “Depression Cherry,” on Aug. 28, the Baltimore-based dream pop duo returned with their even lustier LP on Oct. 16.
Given the short time between releases, Beach House tweeted to fans explaining their sixth album is not “a companion” of “Depression Cherry” or a “surprise collection of b-sides.”
Since the band’s formation in 2004 by French-born Victoria Legrand and Baltimore native Alex Scally, “Thank Your Lucky Stars” is reviewed as one of their best works by both critics and dream pop enthusiasts.
Dream pop is a term that was initially coined by ‘80s band A.R. Kane’s singer Alex Ayuli. It is closely related to shoegaze music in the sense that it channels sadness, contains quiet and somber tunes, and is usually lo-fi and heartfelt.
Beach House is easily related to other alternative artists such as Youth Lagoon, Warpaint, and The Antlers and have opened for artists as prominent as Vampire Weekend and The Dum Dum Girls.
Released under the United States label Sub Pop and United Kingdom label Bella Union, the album accentuates the band’s dreamy aura of slow, poignant, and swaying music.
“Thank Your Lucky Stars” brings some of the band’s older and outgrown styles back into play while simultaneously adding fresh, new themes of reminiscence, childhood, and broken romance.
While the nine-track LP has a strong, harmonious sound, songs like “All Your Yeahs,” “Common Girl,” and “One Thing” feature more of Scally’s experimental highlights with strings and guitar, adding variation to their usual sound.
On the other hand, songs like “Elegy to the Void,” “Rough Song,” and “She’s So Lovely” give listeners an almost nostalgic feel for Legrand’s meditative, one-of-a-kind, and critically appraised vocal style.
While earlier albums such as “Bloom” (2012), “Teen Dream” (2010), and “Devotion” (2008) are all divine in their own unique ways, they unofficially represent the original timbre of Beach House.
For many listeners, “Depression Cherry” seemed both too ethereal and unearthly, as it branches far away from styles in previous albums. “Thank Your Lucky Stars” seems to be more easily digestible by fans for its tuneful core sound, which seems to bring the band’s melody full circle.
As “Depression Cherry” was unusually icy and ghostly, it was slightly shied away from by Beach House fans because of the lack of common ground it had with the band’s original tone.
“Rough Song” is loosely a love song that deals with the ideas of social anxiety, flashbacks to different time in life, and drinking problems.
Lyrics from “Rough Song” like “In the middle of the party / Found a hole to be sorry / Through the glass / Drank a memory of her face” tell the story of a narrator who is at a social event who presumably looks out the window and reminisces about her past love and feels the need to drink the memories away.
“Thank Your Lucky Stars” has definitely been the source of a lot of buzz in the alternative community for possibly being the ultimate Beach House album, considering its profoundly new yet homey flavor that has managed to keep Beach House fans as satisfied as ever.
