POST OF JOY

Beach House, "Saltwater" - There's a part of me that wonders if I'd have ever fallen ass over teakettle in love with Beach House's self-titled debut EP if it hadn't fallen victim to grievous critical misclassification-related violence several times over; I honestly don't think I've read a review of it that doesn't eventually veer off into "I swear to god you'll like it even though it reminds you of..." territory, and they're all doing a profoundly beautiful record an equally profound disservice. I think, you see, that a lot of people probably read a review comparing Beach House to, say, that Mazzy Star record or a Nico album and come away expecting something baroque and magesterial, and while this won't necessarily lead them to walk away empty-handed, it also won't necessarily point them in the right direction towards appreciating this album properly. And by saying that, I don't mean to imply that I've somehow got the market cornered when it comes to appreciating this album; all I know is that precious few (if any) of the pleasure surges Beach House has afforded me so far this year have anything to do with the hazy bliss in which the album blankets itself.

Well, let me qualify that again: they don't have much to do with it directly. Not mentioning the gauzy atmospherics at play on Beach House would be almost as wrongheaded as neglecting to point out the way Vashti Bunyan's voice practically pokes holes through Lookaftering; on a certain level, it's painfully clear that the ambiance that Beach House seem, for the moment at least, almost uniquely qualified to craft is the album's raison d'etre. Crucially, the band seems to be willing to dance with the devil what brung 'em, crafting lyrics of heroic romantic dysfunction and loneliness; with lyrics like "Saltwater"'s "Love you all the time/Even though/You're not mine", it's not hard to see why lots of critics are treating Beach House like a mash-up with Portishead's first album just waiting to happen. And it should be pointed out that I don't mean to be as snarky as I'm probably coming across here; if you want to start ranking albums of delicately dejected torch songs, I'd take Beach House over Black Cherry or Ruby Blue or even the Junior Boys' entire catalogue, because it genuinely is that good.

But I'd be lying if I said that I was really all that concerned with Beach House 's placement in that pantheon whenever I slip it into my car's CD player; the truth is that all of the most salient aspects of this record - and the aspect to which all reviewers who just write it off as a byproduct of the genre Beach House chooses to inhabit - have to do with how flat-out poignant it sounds. Take notice of my hesitation to assign any poignancy to the actual music itself - it's probably as beautiful a record as I've heard this decade, but the three things about beauty are that it's (1) completely subjective, (2) impermanent almost by definition, and (3) therefore not really worth throwing all too much critical weight behind. But Beach House is beautiful on two levels - first on the practical level of their artistic choices (the notes they chose to put in order, the beat to which they chose to marry their compositions, etc), and second (and more importantly) on the mechanical level of the way those choices are born out into song. My frame of reference here is, unsurprisingly, the Flying Pickets' cover of Yaz' "Only You", if only because it's the handiest song I got in terms of musicians sending a song's drama sky-high simply by participating in the creation of its recording, and unfortunately that ungainly clause is Beach House distilled to its essence - the songs are prettier than you can imagine, but the best reasons it's got to stick around past the initial narcotizing rush have to do with the way the band inhabits them. And it's very much a real-time process - with so many arrangements dedicated to showing off just how closed the melodies' circuits really are, the eye you'd have to turn to Beach House to remain blind to all the moments when the humans behind the keys or the drums can't quite capture the mechanical nature of the album would have to be pretty blind indeed. But that makes the process sound accidental, which, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it most certainly is not. "Saltwater", for instance, comes to a head midway through the song when singer Victoria Legrand intones "I'll come/Running/To your side" before punctuating it with one of the single most wistful and hollowed-out "Baby"'s you'll ever hear on a record. For my money, it's the emotional core of the whole record, even if it happens to show up midway through track one; Beach House may find more creative ways to break up the stranglehold in which all the melodies hold it (particularly towards the middle as they start tacking new debts onto the principal of the debt they owe Phillip Glass), but it never gets anywhere as close to as viscerally emotional as it does in that one isolated moment. It doesn't necessarily make the album sound any less constructed - I'm sure Legrand took her time getting that "Baby" out sounding just right - but calling an album out for being a work of artifice seems a little short-sighted to me in this day and age, especially one so dedicated to punching holes in its outer shell to give you a peek at the roiling seas that actually brought the damn thing to your shores in the first place. I don't care how many Virgin Megastore $11.99 blowout bins albums like these end up filling or FOX prime-time soap-opera makeout sessions they end out soundtracking - albums like this don't just happen unless they're just the work of talentless hacks, and Beach House is a top-three album of the year simply by virtue of the way it forces you to keep that in mind. (Click here to visit Carpark Records' webstore and buy Beach House direct from the label)

The Tacticians, "London's Allright" - If Midlake's The Trials Of Van Occupanther can be called the most front-loaded album of the year - and it can, by a comfortable margin - then it seems just as reasonable to posit Tough Love Records' recent compilation What Will Survive Of Us? as the year's most backloaded disc, simply because it flat-out is. Ten of the first nineteen songs on the compilation are, while not outright bad, reasonably described as being "not of too much substance"; it's a veritable avalanche of songs played by the British equivalent of high-school bands who remain unsigned to Domino for a whole grip of perfectly obvious reasons, not the least of which being that they sound like a bunch of British teenagers. The compilation's second half, however, is an unmitigated...delight? Have my standards really slipped so low these last few years that simply finding a compilation which introduces me to good songs qualifies as "delightful"? Or have I just been completely won over by being introduced to one song so ass-kickingly awesome as to render my genuine reactions to the rest of the album moot? Frankly I'm inclined to think it's the latter, although that should be less of a commentary on the second half of What Will Survive Of Us than on the almost unutterable brilliance of the Tacticians' "London's Allright"; even before it winds up deep in the heart of balls-out "SHA-LA-LA-LA" country, it's nothing but the kind of razor-sharp guitar licks that somehow manage to render both Razorlight and the Magic Numbers even more irrelevant (assuming this is possible) simultaneously. I'd actually ordered their follow-up single from the lordly Piccadilly just before What Will Survive Of Us showed up at my apartment; needless to say, I've been checking my mailbox twice an hour every hour I'm at home just to see if it's shown up. (Click here to buy What Will Survive Of Us, which really is a fair bit better than I may have made it sound,directly from Tough Love's MySpace page, or click here to buy the "Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys" single from Rough Trade)

Long Blondes, "Platitudes" - Having been burned badly by haircut indie-rock twice in two years, I'm actually trying to be a little more guarded in my anticipation for the Long Blondes' forthcoming debut record Someone To Drive You Home, if only out of self-preservation - frankly I don't think my fragile little heart can take the revelation of another massive disappointment on the level of Franz Ferdinand, to say nothing of the Kaiser Fucking Chiefs. But the closer to November 6th we get, the more I start to think that I might be worrying needlessly (YEAH THAT'D BE THE FIRST TIME), because I'm rapidly coming to the realization that I actually like the Long Blondes, whereas all the others I just liked their music and thought they were great musicians for being able to make it. That's not to say that I don't think the Long Blondes are intensely great, of course - because I mean duh - but rather that their greatness isn't necessarily tied to that of their songs, a crucial sticking point for anyone who's ever seen songs that they genuinely love inexorably turn, over time, into unlistenably trite shit, to say nothing of someone who found themselves left staring across at the Kaiser Fucking Chiefs after having to watch all the vitality of their songs evaporate completely. But with the Long Blondes, I'm pretty sure I'd be looking for an inroad into their songs even if I hadn't watched them pump out winner after winner for two unbroken years; call me self-serving, but there's just something appealing about the idea of a band that exists to play songs about over-educated indie girls yearning for some romatic action with equally overlearned indie boys, even when they're not singling the ones with Scott Walker records in their shelves out by name. I mean, take "Platitudes", for example: by all accounts, it remains the least compelling of the Erol Alkan-produced Blondes b-sides to have surfaced so far (mostly because people don't seem to be much of a fan of that skronky artificial feedback), but I've been listening to it more than "Fulwood Babylon" and "Last Night At Northgate Street" combined these last few weeks, mostly because I woke up one morning and realized that it happened to address precisely the state of spiritual mistrust I figure I inspire in any girl, much less the archetype of indie chick Kate Jackson may be condemning herself to a lifetime of representing with her continued out-of-the-park-knocking with songs like this, any time I even move my little toe in a direction that might indicate some sort of prurient interest. They really might as well have gotten together to directly address my neuroses alone by employing my musical idiom of choice; the whole rest of the world might as well be inconsequential to this record's success, although I'm sure the Long Blondes would beg to differ. I heartily encourage everyone to buy a copy of Someone To Drive You Home and prove me wrong. (Click here to preorder Someone To Drive You Home from Amazon.co.uk)