The first time we fall in love, the world feels uncomfortably bright. Everyday life takes on an oversaturated quality, as if the scenes playing out before us were flecked with magentas and blues that don’t quite belong, a vividness distilled into one person. Like a chemical high — which love is, of course — we momentarily drift into a consciousness that we can’t quite contain. It’s a dream performed with eyes wide open.
In generic terms, the concept of “dream pop” as soporific feels somewhat nebulous, not least because the classics of the genre — in particular, anything by Cocteau Twins, but certainly their twin masterpieces Treasure and Heaven or Las Vegas — are so violently neon, plastered in a sheen that shares nothing with the relief of sleep. Instead, they belong to that primal understanding of dreams: abundant fantasy, that cartoon version of love where hearts beat out of chests; avatars for a world that defies reality to celebrate something more precious. On their seventh album, Beach House are fully in thrall to the latter.
Continue reading at Tiny Mix Tapes (also reviewed for Clash)
We’re going to the beach. Not the clean, iridescent shores of film scenes or sepia photographs, signifiers of a landscape that privilege the temporal over the spatial — it is always the childhood or the honeymoon that we beckon toward, and whether the sand in the picture belongs to Blackpool or New Jersey is mostly irrelevant — but the real beach. The sun is not shining. It rained a few hours ago, in fact, or is just about to, because there’s a dull kind of sadness in the air that lingers either side of the storm. To your left is a row of shops and cafés, closed on Sunday. To your right is a parking lot, asphalt grey in keeping with the weather, littered but otherwise empty. In front of you is the sea.
On a clear night — wide-eyed, gin-soaked, fists raised, starry-skied — the streets of towns and small cities take on their own blurry glamour. The shatter of glass after dark is a starting pistol here, spurred on by the sound of sirens and the faint taste of blood in the mouth, sprinting around corners and side streets. In the early years, at least, every Wild Beasts song seemed desperate to synthesize that juvenile adrenaline, crooning about exchanges that were sometimes brawling, sometimes lusty, often both. Last Night All My Dreams Came True is their attempt to distill 16 years and five albums into one loving retrospective, a “best of” collection where each song has been re-recorded in one final, go-for-broke session. For a band whose magic was almost entirely captured in those early scenes, it leans pretty hard on their late-career Junior Boys impression, but consistently lifts those tracks beyond their original pallor.
The great marvel of the past is how malleable its shape becomes in the hands of both artists and revisionists, abrading the old guard, chipping away at stubborn monoliths until they give out, easy as sand through the fingers. Brooklyn’s own Widowspeak are riddled with ghosts, hovering between each breath, every reverb-soaked gesture. HBO’s stylish adaptation of Westworld provides several useful pointers, particularly for art that wears its former lives on its sleeves and especially for those who — on perhaps a cruder, more literal level — provide an artificial American frontier as the graveyard for their own hauntology.
Matthew Neale 