Beach House — Teen Dream

Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, create a dream-pop revival on Teen Dream that harkens back to classic sweet male/female pairings of the mid-'80s like Prefab Sprout and The Dream Academy.

The duo's third album does tip its hat to folk-tinged psychedelic indie rock (Grizzly Bear, Fruit Bats and Ramona Falls), though they attempt to map out a musical universe that mixes these bands' ethereal atmospherics with a more personal lyrical focus.

"Norway" is charged with a riveting electric guitar lead and those dreamy Prefab Sprout-ian vocal harmonies. "10 Mile Stereo" adds a dollop of soaring synths that just scream class of 1984 high school reunion.

The album's bliss factor peaks on the introspective "Used To Be" originally released as a single in the autumn of 2008. The song interweaves Scally and Legrand's vocals into a taught, ethereal spiral towards its conclusion.

Teen Dream ends with the haunting, introspective "Take Care," a fitting opus that features an ever-building one-note backing track supporting wonderfully-mushy lyrical romantic promises.

The careful intermingling of modern recording techniques with decades old instrumentation and haunting vocals provides Teen Dream with both a new and familiar atmosphere in the same instance. It's a nice start to a new decade.

The album also includes a DVD consisting of videos for each song. The visuals range from the dull (weird senseless camera effects for "Zebra" to the absurd (a grainy backyard take on old-time wrestling) for "Lover Of Mine," ending at the sublime (a complex narrative of a wolf boy being harassed by other local freaks for "Walk In The Park").

While the videos are interesting, they don't seem to have anything to do the feel or sentiment of the original song. One viewing is more than enough coverage of this unnecessary extra.

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