Bloom

Ten tracks, and the subtractive test finds more of them required than the record’s polish would suggest. Myth must open: its keyboard figure and the slow lift of its chorus set the mode and give the record its word for itself. Irene must close, the long piece that turns ten songs toward an ending by repetition and then by silence. Wild and Lazuli are required as the two plainest ascents; Wishes and On the Sea earn their places as the record’s warmest and its most inward. That is six of ten, each holding a distinct office. Held from the top by the middle: Other People, Troublemaker and New Year restate the sway, the organ bed and the rising refrain without turning them, and the record would survive losing one.

Score: 8.1 / 10

What the record brings into the open is a finding about time and attachment: longing outlives its object, and the wish to keep a moment is itself the moment. Myth sets a self asking for help to name what it is losing; Irene repeats “strange paradise” until the phrase becomes a condition rather than a description, a paradise known as strange while one is still in it. Sound discloses as fully as words, and is credited so: builds that never break and a voice doubled until it is less a person than a weather make audible a nostalgia felt in the present tense. Held from the gate because it is felt more than articulated: the words are left unfixed, and no condition beyond the one feeling is named.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes on most tracks. Myth rises at its chorus over a ringing guitar figure into a wide, sustained height. Wild climbs by accumulation, the drums pushing under the organ until the song opens. Lazuli is the summit of brightness: its arpeggiated keyboard and its final refrain stack voice on voice until the song seems to lift off its ground. Wishes reaches a warm, almost choral height; On the Sea is a held, piano-led suspension. Irene is the long ascent, a repetition that becomes incantation and ends in a roar of organ and drums. Held from the top because the height is of one kind, beauty swelling, never terror and seldom grandeur, and the middle rises only partway.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is named in the first title and evoked across the record, and one figure carries it: paradise and its loss, the garden known only as it fades. The titles reach toward the deep pattern with intent, Myth, Lazuli (lapis, the stone of heaven), On the Sea, Irene (peace, and a name), New Year as the turning of time, and Irene’s “strange paradise” gives the figure weight at the close, where the form itself enacts a paradise that ends and returns. Held back because the figure is evoked and not built: there is no story, no persona held through the record, no pattern whose structure the songs carry, and the sea, the sky and the year stay images laid over one sensibility’s longing.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own: the organ, the slide guitar and the drum machine of its first two records, and above all Teen Dream (2010), which had already moved the sound toward fuller production and live drums. Behind both lies the dream pop of Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. Bloom’s turn is a turn of scale, made with conviction: the drums fuller, the builds longer, the climaxes louder, the production more spacious, until the swell itself becomes the form. That enlargement is credited as a real deepening of the manner. Held back, and the lowest of the counted axes, because the stake was small: the record placed its wager on the proven path, and no element of its language is new to the band or the genre.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows longing as a shape in time: a song that swells and does not break, held at a slow sway until the swelling is the feeling. A tighter Lazuli or a dry voice in Myth would know a different and smaller thing. The doubled voice, weather rather than speaker, is itself the record’s account of a self dissolving into what it misses. The sequence is counted here, once: three ascents, a slack middle, the warmth of Wishes and On the Sea, and Irene as the long ending, its silence and coda enacting the paradise that ends and returns. That close is formal knowledge. Held from the top by the middle, where songs contain the mode rather than carry it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Fourteen years of evidence, and the return yields. On close listening the layers of organ and guitar separate, the harmonised voices sort themselves into lines, and Irene’s long repetition reads differently as a whole than in passing, its silence and coda changing what the repetition meant. The formal depth is real and holds over many hearings, and the record has been returned to across its span by the listeners who come to the band, Myth above all. Held back on the semantic side, which is shallow by design: the words are pitched to be half heard, and a later hearing finds the first hearing’s feeling, more fully felt but not reopened. No tradition of reinterpretation or reworking has yet reopened the record as a single work.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The field is the indie and dream pop album of the early 2010s. Intrinsic force: Bloom takes a language its makers and their forebears had established and gives it scale and finish, the swell made the whole of the form, which sharpened what the idiom could do at full size without reorganising it; its devices, reverb, organ pads, slide guitar, the drum machine, were common property by 2012. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: across the 2010s Beach House became a reference sound for a generation of dream pop and bedroom pop, and that influence runs from the earlier records, Teen Dream and Bloom above all. Held back because no particular practice, record or school can be shown to have turned on Bloom rather than on the band’s sound as a whole.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over fourteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has stayed in print. Presence is real and continuing: Myth has remained among the band’s most heard songs, and the album is heard whole by listeners who come to the band. That earns the head of the row for its span and no more, since wide presence is worth at most a tenth and this presence is wide within its field. The fabric is lightly charged: the reverb and the slow swell are of their decade to the ear, though the organ and drum machine are less fixed to a year than the production of many records of 2012. The span itself holds the figure here.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, and the making is high and load-bearing where the builds carry the meaning. Coady’s production gives the record depth and air without losing the organ’s warmth; Scally’s guitar figures, slide and delay set against the keyboard, are economical and exactly placed; Legrand’s voice, low and grainy, harmonised with itself, is the most distinctive instrument, sung with real control of breath and swell. The arrangements grow by addition and the mixes keep every layer audible inside the mass, which is harder than it sounds. Held from the top by a narrow palette held across the whole, tempos and timbres so close that the craft repeats itself in the middle; drum parts plain where they enter; and weaker songwriting in Other People and New Year.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs the whole without strain: a slow sway, a bed of organ, a doubled voice, a swell that lifts and does not break. The two most distant elements are Lazuli, bright and climbing, and the unlisted coda after Irene’s silence, small and close; both obey the law, one by ascent and one by withdrawal, and the silence between Irene and the coda is governed by it too, a swell withdrawn rather than broken. The record never contradicts itself, from its first keyboard figure to its last small return. Held from the top by the rubric’s warning that narrowness is not coherence: the range the law governs is one tempo band, one palette and one feeling, and the record never tests its physics against anything that might break it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form, and the axis is the lowest of the twelve. Consciousness is held fully, as longing, memory and the wish to keep a moment. Love is present, though the beloved is never particular. Time is held as a subject, in New Year and in the record’s repeated sense of an ending in progress. The natural order is glimpsed in the sea and the sky, as images more than as an order held. What holds the axis there is absence and closeness: all that is present lies within one sensibility, and the family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent; the record declines to name the world around its feeling. The figure describes the reach of this record, not a limit of the form.

Score: 6.8 / 10