I’m back from vacation and in a new house with a slew of new records under my arm and the hi-fi set up in the living room. I’m ready to get on with this project.

First record back onto the saddle is Beach House’s new release, Bloom. As I mentioned earlier, Beach House makes some of the best dream pop around these days, existing in “the sweet spot between pop music and chill music where God intended dreampop to live,” (from my review of Teen Dream, way back on record #26). Bloom’s predecessor is one of my favorite records ever, a cloudy masterpiece of effervescence and ambiguity. Bloom has certain similar qualities; the sound of the record is nearly identical–nothing here would sound out of place on Teen Dream or vice versa–the same droning synthesizers and glassy slide guitars carry Victoria Legrand’s smoky, androgynous voice through the thick reverb coating the record.

But in terms of composition, Bloom is a different beast. Where Teen Dream was often satisfied to have a vocal crescendo peak out of the ambience, on Bloom, the ambience follows after (see: the full-band crash toward the end of Wishes, the whole last half of Irene). Drums, both electric and acoustic, play a larger part, whether pounding away or merely ticking along. Each song swells from beginning to end, sometimes aching as it swells past its skin. This ache is also present in Legrand’s vocals as she sings longingly to some absent “you.”

In the end, comparisons between Teen Dream and Bloom and questions of which is better or if Bloom is different enough to be good prove to be superfluous. Each record captures Beach House doing what Beach House does, and Beach House makes beautiful music that is at once chilling and sunny, atmospheric and direct, and always, always lovely.

Edit: the record’s hidden track, hidden in the mp3 version after minutes of silence, is hidden after a mid-record end-groove, requiring you to put the needle on it yourself if you want to hear it. I appreciate it when record companies do clever things like that with the physical copies of their products.