Thank Your Lucky Stars

Locations
Call Number: CD Rock Beach Thank
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult A/V 2-week checkout	CD Rock Beach Thank	2-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult A/V 2-week checkout	CD Rock Beach Thank	2-week checkout	On Shelf

Majorette -- She's so lovely -- All your yeahs -- One thing -- Common girl -- The traveller -- Elegy to the void -- Rough song -- Somewhere tonight.
Performed by Beach House: Alex Scally, Victoria Legrand.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Nothing is New, and Neither are You... submitted by SineWaveDave on March 10, 2022, 2:22pm I listened to Beach House for such a long net time leading into the Spring of 2021 that I had reached their top 1% of listeners on Spotify. Yet, I had not heard this album, not even a note of it, until around that time. I set it aside for what I had imagined would become a meaningful occasion. I fumbled that bag though, so I somberly digested this album while mentally gluing myself back together. Its emotional potency was not something I was not prepared for at all.

Despite musically dwelling in bleak subject matter longer than most college students spend in undergrad, in 2015 Beach House had a full head of creative steam. One could argue their real blossoming came in the short years prior to 2015, with the releases of "Teen Dream" as well as their legendary "Bloom" album garnering the band unprecedented attention. The massive acclaim they had already accrued up to this point came with Beach Houses' perfecting of their ethereal brand of vintage synth noise, dynamic crooning vocals by Legrand, minimalist drums, and genre-redefining-dream-pop swagger. These core facets of Beach House composition largely remain here, though it is evident that the mixing philosophy took on a thinner and more melancholy new life in this project.

One could argue the Beach House songwriting formula, by this point, had been etched in stone for some years. But in capturing their moment of prolific music-making, their sound evolves in this project. Emphasis shifts for Alex and Victoria, I feel, to a more skeletal approach to songwriting, where only those elements which irreplaceably support its songs are utilized. Compositional set pieces take on tangible subtlety, as piecemeal chordal oscillations dominate the mix as opposed to Beach Houses' characteristic thick, noisy, montages of sound. If you like their stripped-down earlier work from the 2000s, you will likely see this as a sonic compromise of Beach Houses' strumming then and their droning now. I certainly think so.

The main mood conveyed by this album, as I understood it last year as well as now, is isolation. This is a feeling especially encapsulated by the band in its song "Elegy to the Void", a long droning tune built off of an arpeggiated dull synth base and screaming single-note guitar melodic element. This is not to say this entire album does not unrelentingly command the attention of the listener and reward the careful amongst them. Laying gently on top of one another, smooth sawtooth synths glide an ever enthralled listener through this alien soundscape. At once they're grounded by robust bass harmonies and torn skyward by soaring guitars drowning them in compounded reverb.

I don't connect with this album as viscerally as I do with some of their other work. However, the production on this album wasted no tones to tell its story. It has no 'bangers' and it doesn't need them; the album will send you to the moon. There's nobody to mosh with on the moon. You'll just stand there in your big puffy suit, while everything else slowly fades away around you. Well, besides the radioactive dust, which fades slightly more quickly than the rest.

I give it a 7.9 out of 10.0.