Beach House’s music is defined by its crystalline production, melancholic lyrics, and singer Victoria Legrand’s smoky vocals. The Baltimore duo’s sound hasn’t changed drastically over their 15-year career, but their eighth studio album, Once Twice Melody, reflects their history while at the same time taking them in new directions.
The album strikes a satisfying balance between Beach House’s melodic sensibilities and, though not as noisy as 2018’s 7, a willingness to take sonic risks. Whereas songs on the group’s past albums would often reach intensely emotional climaxes, the songwriting and performances on Once Twice Melody are more restrained and contemplative.
This approach complements Legrand’s nuanced lyrics, which don’t feel as nostalgic or fantastical as on 2010’s transcendent Teen Dream. Tracks like “ESP,” “Through Me,” and “New Romance” are subdued yet still melancholic, while Legrand lyrically reflects on a past defined by loss while also anticipating what’s to come.
The album, which clocks in at 84 minutes, is divided into four different chapters. The first is a reverb-laden suite boasting some of Beach House’s most immediate and memorable melodies, including the title track’s arpeggiated acoustic guitar and the subtly distorted bassline and synth passages appear and disappear like blinking lights on “Pink Funeral.”
On the remaining chapters, tracks like “Sunset,” a pastoral meditation that suggests Vashti Bunyan by way of the Cocteau Twins, find Beach House dabbling in psychedelic acoustic balladry. Elsewhere, “The Bells” is driven by a languorous, slide-heavy guitar line, creating an intoxicating atmosphere that complements the lyrics about a love shot into the stratosphere.
The contradictions that are inherent in romantic relationships are the album’s primary lyrical focus. Legrand uses the intensely felt emotions surrounding love and heartbreak as a way to measure the passage of time. On the final track, “Modern Love Stories,” she sings that “the end is the beginning, beginning to an ending, like cells dividing,” before realizing that heartbreak is universal, that moments of loss provide a sense of connection between her and the rest of the world. Legrand recognizes “Cleopatra’s portrait, in the bathroom line” as a reminder that, though each individual’s experiences of love and loss are unique, they transcend history.
Once Twice Melody does occasionally start to feel monotonous, particularly in its back half. Though pleasant enough to listen to, the hazy synth chords and midtempo rhythms of tracks like “Many Nights,” “Illusion of Forever,” and “Only You Know” sound like any number of tracks from Teen Dream or 2008’s Devotion. At over seven minutes, “Over and Over” is the album’s longest track; though the synths and guitar lines are as pretty as anything Beach House have recorded to date, the melody doesn’t develop much beyond the initial verse.
Still, in both its sonic scope and lyrical melancholy, Once Twice Melody artfully captures the all-encompassing complexities of love. Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows.
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