Huge, Grandiose Romance

I knew Beach House was famous when I scalped my two extra tickets — originally $16 dollars — for $100 dollars each. Or maybe I knew five months earlier, when both the Dirty Projectors and members of Vampire Weekend showed up to their album launch show at Brooklyn’s Bell House. Or maybe I knew three months before that, when my hipper-than-thou roomate told me their as-yet-unreleased Teen Dream was the best thing on piratebay.

At this, their homecoming show at the end of a long promotional tour for that record, the Brooklyn trio showed they were a band at the crest of the first wave of fame. But I forgot all of that hype by the encore, when Victoria Legrand’s intimate rendition of their wispy romantic standard, “Real Love,” actually moved me to tears. There I was, humbly crying amid the plaid shirts of New York’s cynics. How had they done it?

Beach House would seem to have what every dream-pop band has. With a few pre-recorded synths, this is just a simple guitar / keyboard / drums trio with a singer whose gravelly voice is oft-compared to Nico’s. But a Beach House song sounds like no other. Spare lyrics paint snatches of intimate moments, sloughing over skeletal keyboard lines that are instantly hummable — yet have a kind of grandiose sound (thanks partly to the fact that the album was recorded in a church). Most songs are set in a minor key, eliciting a dark, melodramatic soundscape that evokes that moment at twilight when the world, brightly blue, seems equally sad and hopeful. Drums are most present as flutterings of cymbals. Bass lines trickle up and down. Think Mazzy Star, Yo La Tengo… On “Silver Soul,” Legrand’s voice rises highest and happiest on the lyric of, “It is happening again.” It’s a delightfully opaque phrase, rewarding multiple listens; Is she sad that a disaster is repeating? Or is she falling in love again? It could be anything. But the blustery, wheezy mood of the track makes us think this portends disaster.

Legrand as a "swamp monster" in the green light. Photo Credit: Adriane Quinlan

The venue turned on a disco ball -- only adding to the overt romanticism of the band. Photo Credit: Adriane Quinlan

The band grew out of a Baltimore friendship between Alex Scally — who never picked up a guitar before this project — and Victoria Legrand, whose thick whispery vocals and massive head of tangled hair have characterized the band’s live image. That was definitely on view at Webster Hall — where Legrand, at the center of the stage, seemed like the only thing anyone in the audience was watching.

After an opening set from chillwave kid, Washed Out, the curtain went up on a set studded with confetti-covered pinatas in the shapes of diamonds. It looked like Superman’s icy “Fortress of Solitude.” The lights went neon green and the band plodded on, opening with “Walk in the Park.” It’s a quiet, sombre song — but that didn’t stop this audience from hooting.

Legrand, with her long hair obscuring her face, looked like a swamp monster in the green light. Her over-sized white tuxedo jacket nodded toward the showmen, like Sinatra, who once wooed New York crowds. But beneath it hid a sexy secret. Her black cocktail dress had a strip cut out in the center of it — around her torso — which was held together with metal clips.  As she swayed behind the piano, inches of flesh were exposed and one of the boys beside me, between songs, sardonically noted to the other, “She’s so hot, I want to jizz on her face.” (Of course it was ironic. What Beach House fan would ever say anything crude?)

The night was all about Legrand. Photo Credit: Adriane Quinlan

Next up was “Used to Be” — a love song longing for a better past, “Are you not the same as you used to be?” It was a sexy jam. And after it wrapped, kids in the front started yelling toward the stage, “Turn the vocals up.” The mix had allowed for the vocals to be pretty much what they were on the album — nestled in the band’s grandiose sound. But that didn’t work well for this crowd, many of whom seemed to have turned out as fans of Legrand’s rather than fans of Beach House.

Still, I admit it sounded a lot better with the vocals up when they went into a few older hits off 2008′s Devotion. “Master of None” is one of my favorite Beach House tracks and I loved them for playing it, despite this new crowd’s apathy. Next was “Heart of Chambers” and “Astronaut.” But then they flowed back into the album their audience new so well, and the hooting started up again. “Take Care” was so moving live that when Legrand mouthed the lyrics, “I’ll take care of you” — looking out to the scruffy audience — she seemed like some kind of lovely mother figure. No one in the audience wouldn’t have rushed the stage to be taken care of.

The band played one brand new song, “White Moon” (embedded below). It was a tad faster with a more tropical sound and a few clicky maracas. The audience didn’t react — perhaps because they were too stunned to do anything. It worked — but it was clearly out of sync with the rest of “Teen Dream” and broke the mood.

You could have cut the mood in the room with a knife. Photo Credit: Adriane Quinlan

The set ended with “Zebra” — the rousing opening track off their last album. There, Legrand went a bit crazier than she had on other songs. In the bars where she wasn’t needed to play on keyboards, she whipped her huge mane back and forth. The band exited, but the lights didn’t go up and everyone knew an encore was simply a matter of time. The sound in Webster Hall was huge — screaming, clapping, stomping. “We feel very lucky, thank you,” is what Legrand said when they made their entrance — hushing the hipsters.

The band started back up with “Real Love,” and yes — in that spare, simple jam — that’s where I teared up. Opening up with a few quiet bars of simple piano and a quiet timbre of drums, it rendered the audience absolutely silent. I felt my mouth drop. “The color you say is black,” Legrand whispered out — to some past lover — “is the one you might lack.” By the second line of, “I met you somewhere / In the air beneath the stairs,” I was in tears. But I couldn’t pin-point exactly what had moved me. It just felt so intimate and spare. And that’s the beauty of a skeletal Beach House song: You can’t take it apart any further. You can’t strip it. It’s soul is already bared.

Their rendition of “Real Love” at Webster Hall:

They also performed a brand new song, “White Moon”:

Photo Credit: Adriane Quinlan