Victoria Legrand (left) and Alex Scally from Baltimore indie-pop outfit Beach House.Courtesy of St Jerome’s Laneway Festival
2010 has been a stellar year for Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, the duo behind Baltimore indie-pop outfit Beach House.
After signing to indie mega-label Sub Pop, the band released their third album Teen Dream, which proved to be something of a breakout hit.
Armed with a more upbeat, effervescent sound — with the occasional nod to shoegaze-haze pop — it unanimously wowed critics and audiences alike with its languid, sensuous melodies. Even the notoriously fickle critics at Pitchfork — indie music’s ultimate hipster bible — awarded the album a near-perfect 9.0.
Perhaps you know you’ve made it when pop’s biggest stars, Beyonce and Jay-Z, have been spotted watching you perform at Coachella.
But in spite of the band’s triumphs, Beach House’s vocalist Victoria Legrand — anointed by some music journalists as this generation’s Stevie Nicks — remains remarkably grounded about it all. She speaks to me over the phone from Baltimore.
“It’s been a great year and we’re very grateful,” she says. She is also reluctant to embrace the idea that Beach House is an overnight success.
“It’s been a very natural evolution,” she says. “While we’ve had a lot of mainstream attention this year, Teen Dream was really the product of four years of touring and hard work.”
And the touring seemingly never ends. In August and September, they supported Vampire Weekend — the darlings of the sweater-set — for the North American leg of their tour.
In January next year they will make their first foray into South-East Asia as part of the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival in Singapore, before embarking on an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand.
In hindsight, Legrand muses that the beginnings of Beach House seemed fairly auspicious.
Both her and Scally have considerable music pedigree: She is classically trained and the niece of acclaimed French film composer Michel Legrand; guitarist Scally also has a classical background. After a stint of living in France, she decided she wanted to continue playing music. In 2004 she followed a friend (also a musician) to Baltimore, who in turn introduced her to Scally. From there, Beach House was born. Their creative partnership instantly “felt really natural and effortless”. When one listens to their albums, the intense musical chemistry is blindingly apparent. “You know, it’s not every day that you meet somebody with whom you can create poetry with,” she says.
Their first two albums, Beach House and Devotion, released through Carpark Records, established the band’s reputation as makers of hazy, lovelorn pop. Sweet melodies provided a delightfully incongruous accompaniment to somber lyrics about desire, dependence and self-effacement.
Teen Dream continues in this tradition, but the instrumentation is more complex, the influences more diverse. The sound is brighter, more hi-fi – perhaps evoking a nostalgia for a time when it was okay to embrace unmitigated passions and overwhelming desires.
The title of the album isn’t necessarily a reflection of adolescence, says Legrand, but is descriptive of “how passionate we felt when we made the record, how we kind of fell in love with the process and experience and the music. We found that when we were making Teen Dream, we were completely inspired by everything in a really overwhelming way.”
While Beach House has racked up a number of serious accomplishments, Legrand says there are no desires to leave Baltimore for the sunny shores of LA or the polished grittiness of New York.
Although Baltimore was not specifically an influence on Teen Dream, Legrand says the city has been crucial to the band’s success.
“There’s a very supportive and healthy artistic community in Baltimore,” she explains. “It’s very laid-back, and it doesn’t have a lot of distractions. It’s a small city and it’s very affordable. No one is preoccupied with ‘making it big’. ”
People from Baltimore are also very enthusiastic about their local musicians, which means that Beach House are extended an impassioned welcome from their fans at home.
Certainly, the popularity and acclaim of Teen Dream has made it something of a tour de force: It has exposed the band to audiences outside of the indie-pop enclave. (Legrand also featured in a duet with Grizzly Bear on the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack.)
But Legrand insists the band isn’t fazed by the inevitable follow-up album.
“The pressure doesn’t come from others,” she says, “The pressure we feel is always internal.” The commercial imperatives of being on a record label are irrelevant. “I don’t think any particular record of ours is better than the other,” she elaborates. “We don’t approach music-making by thinking, ‘Our next record has to be better than Teen Dream’. We always focus on what we enjoy, what is inspiring us and how we can combine our passions and eccentricities.”
Legrand assures me the process behind creating their highly anticipated follow-up album will be in the same vein. She doesn’t seem to preoccupied about the notion of “musical direction”, preferring to see it as an organic part of the creative process.
“We never approach [music] from the outside,” she says. “With our music, it’s always going to come about from the internal: a very real, intuitive and emotive place”.
