My Review: Beach House - Once Twice Melody

 My Review:

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

An abundant flow of solicitations can have a soft skin, leaning on dreams toward emptiness, without fear, following its identity with that lightness that conquers above all itself. When all this happens magic appears to clap its hands, satisfied, later granting a tender, very tender embrace.

Everything occurs with an album that entered the scribe's mind without hesitation. Two American youngsters, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, captains of beauty, have long dwelt in the streets of dreams, of the inspiration, of cashmere sweaters on equally soft notes, carrying within their grooves all the will to still give music an imprint without dark spots on its surface. Once Twice Melody is a breath within the incursions of waves that want to find a pause. The two stop them and feed their melodies: this record is a meeting between madness and simplicity, a resource for the soul that waits for good fuel and not fine dust, which pollutes by deceiving.

Among these eighteen tracks there are no falsehoods, but sincere propensities for envelopment, between an aperitif and caresses coming out of soothing notes.

Like a series of dynamic ranges, the two have instructed the songs to be spaceships with the task of extracting sparks of light from any prevailing darkness, in order to be able to place them inside the palms of these artists, wizards of sonic sighing, and to paint smiles so that we can depend on them.

Everything becomes a contemporary gaze, where nothing is missing: fog, light and dark shades, a tired sun, mental appetites, stories with gray textures, waves and dolphins in a complicit play, and much more. 

Intuitive flows, remarkable architectural dynamics are intelligently spread to reach the senses, where the possibility of dancing with eyes closed knows great dimensions, especially domestic, in one's living room, in one's bedroom. Granted the opportunity to give music again a primarily personal fruition, the possibility is also offered to make this album an embrace that goes outside those boundaries.

The sonic mood is clear, visiting the fascination of human places, the inner ones, with a spirituality intersecting with a well-distributed electronic form, gentle rivers bring us these sound waves with precision and care in the production of the highest quality.

A balanced sense of mainstream but never trivial reminiscences wins, where one can discern elements of contact with record releases of two/three decades ago, perfectly absorbed and reworked with those splashes of some brilliant choices.

The two bring us seeds of light without switches, with that kindness that distinguishes them, polite angels in places and times that certainly are not, giving all this a medal to the value of the intention: to be vehicles of beauty.

These are songs that come out of time, out of contemporaneity without being an escape: there are elements of contact with reality but with a grace that it has only in small doses, making them tracks like miracles, to be blessed and preserved, jealously. It is a path made of transformations, of  points of approach between melodies and good vibrations, with a view to feel an abandonment within notes skillfully put in a condition to generate sunbeams, softness, to bring the gaze upward with the impression of entering into a pact with the absence of gravity, in order to absent oneself for real from earthly structures, so inclined to heaviness that in turn generates darkness and dirt. This is a work in which the attitude of engaging individual delicacies so that they become eternal custodians triumphs. Seconds fly by, fears do not cease to live, but within Once Twice Melody they find no residence, making the whole capable of withstanding everyday distortions. Among various compendia there is the certainty of a work that makes us experience the past as a possibility, almost absurd, to be able to change it because this is the magic, the most unsettling act of compositions with a linen texture, light and fluttering, to reach far-off times.

The freshness of this record leads to more and more elegantly woven musical territories, not forgetting that pop/shoegaze attitude, masterfully sewn on synths to make us discover really interesting connections. It comes out of winter to feed spring with a new light, the flavor of lightness takes possession of this pair of souls in order to make us dream.

You just have to get slowly drunk, track by track, with your eyes closed and your dreams open....

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th June 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/2eTxZYoqIv4MoLqwh73qvo?si=U4kq70g2S7WVB0Ue9Gt93Q