It’s been a prolific past month for the Baltimore-based band, Beach House. Their newest release, Thank Your Lucky Stars, dropped just a few weeks after the group released another full-length album, Depression Cherry. Yet unlike their earlier release, this new collection of songs feels like it was rushed out of the studio. Although Beach House’s work ethic is admirable, Thank Your Lucky Stars is a mostly drab foray into uninspired dream pop territory.
Beach House delivers their usual combination of glossy indie pop, yet sacrifices strong songwriting to follow the trendy sound of detached and reverb-soaked coffee shop jams. Most of the tracks have more focus on the spacey production than the instruments themselves. Pretty echoing vocals can only carry each song so far before everything becomes a sleep-inducing drone. “All Your Yeahs” has beautiful keyboard sounds, but painfully boring melodies. The fact that all of the songs have slow tempos demonstrates a lack of urgency throughout the album. The word that comes to mind is lackadaisical, with lifeless vocal performances that make ears yearn for Beach House’s earlier material.
There are a few upsides toThank Your Lucky Stars — two, to be exact. “Marjorette” and “She’s So Lovely” are two well-written songs. The first track attracts listeners with an arpeggiated guitar melody and higher register vocals, but the song isn’t repetitive like the rest of the album. It’s also not a bad song for making out with your thick-rimmed-glasses-wearing significant other. “She’s So Lovely” is an intriguing, and far from the stereotypical declaration of love, with insightful lines like “Everything about her/Mannerisms of another,” providing plenty of detail and personality when describing the subject of the song.
Unfortunately, these two songs don’t make up for the rest of Thank Your Lucky Stars. Hopefully Beach House will add more to the equation for its next release.
Voice’s Choices: “Majorette,” “She’s So Lovely”
