Album Rating: 4.5

flag your optimism is geniunely candid and kinda cute, but also fuck off let us seethe kek

Album Rating: 4.5

the new material is fucking incredible lol

Album Rating: 4.5

ive listened to each song at least 10 times and theyre going in exactly the direction i want them to, hopefully it grows on yall

Album Rating: 3.0

pink funeral is kind of good tbh rly still don't like the others though. i hope the album is good truly

Album Rating: 4.5

"flag your optimism is geniunely candid and kinda cute, but also fuck off let us seethe kek"



Fine fine, but you guys are always so negativeeeeeeeeee

Album Rating: 4.5

i am not and im very excited to give the new album a 4.5 or a 5 : )

Album Rating: 5.0

New stuff clicked with me almost immediately. I lobve it and don't get the hate.

Album Rating: 4.0

Not a fan of this release method, might just wait for the full release.

Beach house is half incredible atmosphere half highly infectious choruses. When they sacrifice one or the other, or god forbid both, we get songs like pay no mind, bluebird, and every song so far on the new album barring pink funeral. Beach house are at their absolute best when they're writing stuff like myth, levitation, drunk in LA, walk in the park, troublemaker, and so on. I guess it depends on what you enjoy most about beach house, but they've been on a slow but steady decline since depression cherry imo, writing some rly uninspired meandering dream pop

"half incredible atmosphere half highly infectious choruses. When they sacrifice one or the other, or god forbid both"
has it always been this easy to smell false dichotomies

How is that false pls explain

just seems like a really artificial and not particularly representative way to bisect their sound
esp for tracks like Levitation where the whole ~atmosphere seeps out of the development of that chorus motif (which i'd barely call a chorus to begin with); the Vibe and progression are simple and holistic that it doesn't make any sense to pull them apart and draw some arbitrary line between where the song works because its "atmosphere" or its "songwriting". two sides of the same coin
almost all their tracks live and die by atmosphere, even if they have the hooks to hold up as pop songs; if there's any constant BH formula, it's in how much some combo of turgid songwriting and bland melodies detract from this on a song-to-song basis

Yeah I might not characterize that moment on levitation as a true chorus, but it has an undeniably beautiful and memorable hook. So I guess you could swap out what I said about choruses per se and just replace it with good hooks (lauzuli also comes to mind as having two distinct halves but fits the criteria of being very catchy and atmospheric).

"the Vibe and progression are simple and holistic that it doesn't make any sense to pull them apart and draw some arbitrary line between where the song works because its "atmosphere" or its "songwriting". two sides of the same coin"

And yeah I agree they're both integral to the song, I wasn't trying to say "this song only works because it has a chorus and has atmosphere", but I feel like it illustrates my point when you compare it to some of their duller material that's devoid of one or the other.

Superstar is top tier. Through Me is less great but still great. The other two tracks are mid, but not bad. Excited for the rest.

I was wrong to say some songs don't have atmosphere. Obviously you could argue every song has some kind of atmosphere. Let me amend my original statement to this: in the absence of good hooks, the atmosphere alone usually isn't enough to carry their songs. Pay no mind is again a great example of this. It's just a nothing track

https://open.spotify.com/track/62NzFEaepm39q5WE2C0gAs?si=YLxx2vfaQo-XIfI8H6OxZg&utm_source=copy-link

Does anyone else think this version of used to be is way better than the album version?

Are you familiar with ambient music?

Yeah I don't usually prefer the more raw cuts but there's something about how the single is mixed

"Let me amend my original statement to this: in the absence of good hooks, the atmosphere alone usually isn't enough to carry their songs"
hmmmmm yes maybe BUT i think this Discourse has skirted over the many good things that songwriting can do (but generally didn't within the Beachverse until this alb) that aren't bound up with hooks. take Dark Spring - the melodies are strong in their way, but not exactly catchy; the reason it's an awesome song has more to do with tone choice and pacing than anything else, similar story on Black Car, Dive and ig maybe maybe Sparks. although making smart use of that kinda toolkit is rare for BH, I think they're a pretty helpful counterpoint to outline why lacklustre moments across their discog don't land
although sometimes their songwriting is so lazy that's not even necessary. take Wildflower, which I do kinda v much enjoy - it's got a Sweet Trip - Chapters effect where every section sounds great and has the right Vibe and the hooks are wonderful, but there's this sense that builds the more you hear it where it feels like it's various lovely constituent elements are placed alongside one another in a really uninspiring way and it doesn't have that fully realised magic value that songwriting should be, uh, there for? if that figures? haven't attempted to think deeply about this band in ages or potentially ever, excuse the fluff

tl;dr hope we can all agree that a beach house ambient album should be banned from every pharmacy ever on compassionate grounds