Beach House at the Granada
“Is everybody feeling romantic?” Beach House guitarist Alex Scally softly asked the audience midway through the band’s performance at the Granada Tuesday night.
It was hard not to feel a little bit romantic watching Beach House perform, especially with lighting cues that cast the band members in passionate reds, purples, and blues amid swirling vortices of pumped-in fog. Often there were little to no lights at all.
The band was definitely reaching for a specific kind of mood. It’s a mood that the Baltimore duo perfected musically over the course of three albums: a mood that is strikingly particular and yet ineffable. Romance? Perhaps. But rousing beneath their music is something more electric, diffuse and emotional. I want to say their music is timeless; but, it is probably more correct to say that it is lost in time. The mood created by Beach House’s slow drifting baroque pop feels like a hazy memory or déjà vu. Leaving the Granada after their set, I felt ionized.
