Preview: Beach House
To paraphrase Coolio - Gonna spend Tuesday night, living in a hipster’s paradise.
For Cardiff Arts Institute, they of Lego’d walls and deliberately idiosyncratic bric-a-brac play host to Beach House. A mid-week in February can’t get much hipper.
Beach House’s reputation and following had been growing steadily, yet has accelerated over the past few months with the release of their third album Teen Dreams.
Now Baltimore’s second finest export (after The Wire natch) find themselves as the ‘blog rock’ darlings du jour, not always a pleasant place eh Black Kids?
Whether by design or default their sound which floats between the dream-like, hazy, summer-longing scene of ‘glo-fi’ (see Washed Out, Neon Indian, Memory Tapes etc.) and the stripped, hushed, emotional rawness of The xx (who in turn own a great deal to Cardiff’s very own pioneers Young Marble Giants) is the current soundtrack of the hipster.
While Beach House - and ‘glo-fi’ in general - have been criticised for their non-political nature in some quarters (probably dads in Clash t-shirts) the escapism they offer is most welcome during these grey months. It’ll be interesting to see what Beach House do live, if they can transfer their ambient soundscapes into a spectacle rather than a fug of chug and to see the curveball that Lawrence Arabia offers in the support slot.
The gig is sold out and has been for a while, but hey there’s usually someone who can’t make it, so might be worth popping down... or not.
The review of the gig can be found here.
