Last year, a band called Manchester Orchestra released an album titled Cope that confused its fan base. They are an outfit known for blending high energy rock and roll with beautiful, vocally driven ballads, but this new release seemed to focus on the aggressive nature of their sound entirely. The album felt like it was missing a vital element of what made Manchester such a great band.
Just as Cope seemed to be fading into irrelevancy, an accompanying album titled Hope dropped without any sort of announcement from the band. It contained alternate versions of all the songs completely bare of all abrasiveness or distortion. With minor changes to the lyrics, the songs now felt like beautifully written ballads capturing the missing aspect of their sound entirely. Manchester Orchestra played a brilliant trick and restored all hope in their fan base. They successfully split their sound in half and used the element of surprise to their advantage.
This year, Baltimore’s dream pop duo Beach House pulled a similar move in the complex chessgame that is the music industry. August saw the release of Depression Cherry, the highly-anticipated follow up to Bloom. The new record confused fans in the same way Cope did, because of its headfirst dive into shoegazing production. Bloom to Depression Cherry did not exactly seem like a smooth transition.
Two months pass and Thank Your Lucky Stars is dropped without any announcement whatsoever. Is it a B-sides record? No. Is it Depression Cherry Part 2? No. Should it be a viewed as a complementing half of Depression Cherry? No. The move Beach House pulled may have been similar to Manchester’s but not identical. The band’s sixth LP is a darker, more politically-based album that should be viewed as a separate entity entirely. Beach House does make it difficult for fans to not compare two albums released a mere two months apart, but that’s the challenge.
Thank Your Lucky Stars sounds like the bridge that separates Bloom and Depression Cherry. The songs are less spacey and the vocals float more peacefully above the mix as opposed to being drowned within. The instrumentation is more guitar-based and full band sounding along the likes of Teen Dream.
If you are looking for the modern version of the Cocteau Twins, check this album out. Beach House has been a huge part of bringing Dream Pop back to the mainstream spotlight and every album in their catalogue in worth checking out.