BEACH HOUSE

Bloom

[Sub Pop]

On their first three albums, Beach House architects Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand built one of the more recognizable sounds in modern indie rock. With the fourth, they don’t change things up so much as they focus and improve them. As always, the songs mix drum-machine beats with the dizzying slo-mo whoosh of keyboard, echo-rich guitar and Legrand’s stately, often unintelligible vocals. It’s a recipe for gloriously melancholic, paradoxically uplifting music—especially on “Myth” and lead single “Lazuli,” which center on the fleeting nature of pleasure. The dreaminess (abetted by producer Chris Coady, returning from 2010’s Teen Dream) gives even the loveliest tunes an undercurrent of dread, as on “Wild,” which finds Legrand singing, “My mother said to me that I’d get in trouble/Our father won’t come home ’cause he’s seeing double.” On “Wishes” she sings, “The roses on the lawn don’t know what side you’re on,” effectively welcoming listeners into a world where everything is pretty but nothing is as it seems. –Kenneth Partridge

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