Beach House: Alex Scally (guitar/keyboards) and Victoria Legrand (vocals/keyboards), the latter of whom is the niece of french composer Michel Legrand, create the dreamy lo-fi sounds of Beach House. The Baltimore duo formed in 2005 with Legrand’s vocal hush and Scally’s delicate instrumentation. Within a year, Beach House charmed indie music enthusiasts across the blogosphere with their languid songcraft, while the eerie warmth of “Apple Orchard” landed on Pitchfork’s Infinite Mixtape MP3 series in August 2006. Two months later, Beach House issued their eponymous debut album for Carpark. Fall shows with labelmates Over The Atlantic were also scheduled.
I heard this band first on the GSU college radio station WRAS and considering how excellent the song was I ended up getting their latest album released in February called Devotion. I have a feeling a lot of people here might like it (and their earlier album too) considering it's mostly very downtempo/chill and relaxing stuff. According to Wikipedia their sound is often compared to Mazzy Star and Nico which I am not HUGELY acquainted with so I can't really comment upon. The duo's vocalist, Victoria, is excellent and I think the natural simplicity of the songs (since there are only two members) really helps their particularly strong melodies shine through. Some of the more common tags on last.fm are dream pop, lo-fi, dreamy, and indie (that helps) and now I will shut up and link you to the song that I first heard of theirs:
You Came to Me, or the
video in case you're interested.
The album as a whole is damn good, but some of my favorites besides that showcase their sound pretty well include Gila, Holy Dances, and Astronaut.
