Music Review: "Myth"

You know that Wilco documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?” Well, it’s a great film, and it happens to detail the creation of one of my favorite albums, 2002’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” There’s one scene in particular that I will never forget: Wilco is in the studio, recording what would eventually become “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” and their late guitarist Jay Bennett is explaining how they’re using ambience and synthetic noise to construct the track “Poor Places.”

 "I used to think that some core element—a melody, a lyrical refrain—was 'the song' and that everything else was just superficial flavoring. "

“A lot of times when you’re playing, if you don’t have any, like, sonic landscape behind you, everything turns into a folk song,” he says.

Next thing you know, Bennett is kneeling on the floor by his propped up Les Paul guitar. And, like a musical shaman of sorts, he’s holding an electric egg beater against the guitar’s fretboard, generating a textural, atonal hum.

Watching that scene literally changed the way I experienced music. I used to think that some core element—a melody, a lyrical refrain—was “the song” and that everything else was just superficial flavoring. But after seeing Wilco deliberately create landscapes out of scraps of sound, all of my beliefs were obliterated. In reality, there is no distinction between the sonic landscapes and the core elements of a song. There is one thing and that thing is inhabited by many other things, and when I start to listen, my experience as a listener becomes a part of that thing.

Taoists call this perceptual paradox Taiji, which roughly means “supreme polarity.” Think of an object and its shadow. Your brain delineates the two as separate things, but they’re entirely interdependent on each other’s existence to form a complete phenomenon. Does this make sense? No? Ok, I’ll try again.

Beach House’s fourth album “Bloom,” released in 2012, begins with a song called “Myth,” which opens with a pair of discordant noises: (1) a spray paint can sound loop, and (2) a bell sample. Then, after five seconds, Alex Scally’s reverb-drenched guitar arpeggios enter the mix. But then, a hanging tom/floor tom drum pattern complicates the rhythm. Buried deep in the mix, a glistening keyboard begins to double the guitar, playing the same E-major/C-minor chord progression across a whole scale instead of in sixths.

By the time lead singer Victoria Legrand’s husky contralto enters the equation, an entire world has been created within “Myth.” And after about two minutes, just when you think you’ve got this whole thing figured out, Beach House vacuums out the song’s atmosphere in favor of urgent vocals and four repeating open chords. “Myth” does eventually return to its original formula, but it’s already changed. The keyboards are more pronounced. The vocals are double-tracked. The guitar is sparser. And it all eventually melts away for a guitar solo that doesn’t sound like a guitar solo. Those discordant noises from the opening? They’re all but irrelevant by the end of the song.

“Myth,” more than anything, is Beach House’s thesis statement. The band has spent their entire career perfecting the sound of weighty, wounded dream pop. Across six studio albums, they have continuously dealt with the transcendent and the ineffable, capturing the paradoxical emotions that we experience but can’t explain. The massive in the intimate. The warmth in sadness. The “Bloom” in the dark. With “Myth,” and the rest of the album it occupies, Beach House has sharpened their songwriting, making songs that are simultaneously hookier and wispier. Even for all the musical changes and subtle layering, “Myth” is as accessible as it is indefinable.

That’s why Beach House is the only contemporary band that consistently captures the ineffable. They combine individual elements that normally don’t go together and unfurl them as overlapping tides of sound. The crests and troughs of those tides and the patterns they form sift into unfounded places between conventional emotion. That’s why their music reminds you of a memory that doesn’t exist. That’s why you feel painfully alone yet warmly embraced. It’s just how Beach House writes songs.

It annoys me when music listeners criticize Beach House for lacking in musical development. Beach House finds great depth in stability. And frankly, other bands haven’t even come close to approaching the corner that they occupy. Nobody writes songs like this. No one understands sonic landscapes like this, not even Wilco. No one does but Beach House.