Beach House Steps Out of the Shadows on "Teen Dream"
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Cleveland Scene, June 2010
It’s not too often that one can pinpoint the exact moment when a band hops the fence from obscurity to celebrity, but for Beach House, it was probably this past January the 22nd.
Just a few days before the Baltimore duo’s Sub Pop debut Teen Dream hit shelves and raked in the praise, Victoria Legrand (vocals, keyboards) and Alex Scally (guitar) found themselves on the set of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon—performing on television for the first time in their career with the highly-rated final episode of Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show as their lead-in. If Beach House’s first four years had taken place in a frying pan, this was most certainly the fire.
“It’s a little nerve-racking and bizarre to play like that—one song on national TV,” Legrand says. “But the crew and Jimmy himself were lovely and all chilled out. We brought our own lighting and our fur [stage] structures and they were cool about it. The whole thing had a surreal element to it, to be sure, but it was fun.”
Admittedly, “Beach House on Fallon” isn’t exactly on par with “Beatles on Sullivan,” but for a band that had mostly cultivated its cult status in the shadows over the course of two hypnotic, ethereal albums (2006’s Beach House and 2008’s Devotion), the TV gig was both a coming out party and a statement to the group’s existing devotees. With the iconic Sub Pop label behind them, things were about to change.“Yeah, it was a practical decision,” Legrand says, referring to Beach House’s move from the respected but small Carpark label to Sub Pop. “[Sub Pop] had been interested since the first record, but Alex and I weren't interested in bigger labels. We didn't feel like waiting around for some stupid record deal that would take forever and then having to tour the record for two years like some bands do. We just wanted to put it out and start touring right away, and that's where Carpark came in. We've been DIY for over four years-- never used to having people do things for us. But moving to Sup Pop was about widening our artistic channel; getting a bigger house so our ideas-- our mental furniture-- could have more room to grow. It wasn’t a glamorous decision about blowing up.”
In fact, as Legrand sees it, Sub Pop may have had more to gain from the arrangement than she and Scally did.
“We definitely cultivated our fan base ourselves,” she says. “No label did that for us. If anything, labels need bands today. A band doesn't need a label if they're touring their asses off and cultivating their universe. Bands basically make labels look better. It's a great change from the way it used to be, I think.”
So, whether Beach House needed Sub Pop or vice versa, the result has been, by virtually all accounts, the best Beach House record to date. Halfway through 2010, many critics’ “Best of the Year” lists still include Teen Dream—an album that twisted and bent the band’s dream-pop templates enough to create a more cohesive and energized—but no less distinctive-- collection of songs; including the current college radio staples “Zebra,” “Norway,” and “10 Mile Stereo.”
“I think it's been a natural evolution for us,” Legrand says. “Teen Dream wouldn’t exist without the previous two albums. But a lot of it is also the result of lots of touring and the bottling of life and live energy that goes into that.”
If one song on Teen Dream epitomizes Beach House’s growth, it’s—appropriately enough— a track called “Used to Be.” Legrand and Scally actually released an earlier version of this song as a Carpark single in 2008, and it had all the classic Beach House elements in abundance—a grade-A pop melody, a Phillip Glass-style organ riff, droning atmospherics courtesy of Scally, and the otherworldly vocal aeronautics of the classically trained Legrand. When they started playing it live, however, “Used to Be,” like Beach House itself, began a slow metamorphosis.
“We felt that there was an emotional depth in the original that could be cultivated more,” Legrand says. “So we worked on it and changed its shape and bone structure and flesh. We worked with different sounds; we removed certain sounds, etc. In the end it was about transition in the arrangement. We wanted to bring ‘Used To Be’ to the level of a ‘Norway’ or any of the songs on Teen Dream, for that matter. …We're probably more intense now than ever before when we hear things we write. But fortunately, our ability to work obsessively on something together has remained the same.”
Five years into their passionate (but notably platonic) musical partnership, Legrand and Scally have also maintained a simple philosophy when it comes to playing music, no matter how big the audience gets.
“It’s not a job,” Legrand says matter-of-factly. “We don’t ever want it to feel like it is.”
For 2009 Beach House feature in Chicago Innerview Magazine, go here
