Beach House

Teen Dream
(2010)
Beach House

Growers are the best records.

This is a fairly well-established principle of the music lover, the connoisseur, the audiophile; albums that get better on repeated listening are generally preferred, and for the obvious reason that they give you, in a purely fiscal sense, more bang for your buck.

Growers are fairly common; not common enough, unfortunately, and they tend to become less common as the public taste grows away from albums, but they aren't exactly a rare beast. You'll always be able to find a few. What's less common, and what I tend to appreciate the most, is a sub-family of the grower album, the Active Grower. Now, the Active Grower is an album that actually grows on you as you listen the first time. These tend to be albums with a hypnotic power, which, I'll admit, could be argued as a form of cheating, but it works for me, so who's to argue?

I haven't listened to Beach House before. This album, Teen Dream, is a lovely thing, with great, slow-burning melodies. The track that first stuck out to me was "Walk in the Park," which sounds so much like Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" that it provoked me to pull out Veckatimest and give it a listen. The rest of the album follows the same general pattern, with dreamy tracks topped by sweet, hummable melodies. It's all very... nice, I suppose. But not in the bad way.

No, this is actually very good. And as you listen to it, you get sucked further in... most of this album hovers at a similar tempo, and, as I said earlier, it becomes hypnotic. By the end, you love every moment of it. And then you start it over and realise you loved all of it the whole time.