Ray-splendent!

[Video][Website]
[6.15]

Patrick St. Michel: Beach House’s Teen Dream synched perfectly with the train ride from my home in the countryside to the big city, the album ending just as I pulled into the big downtown station. Since that coincidence, their music has always sounded best while I’m in transit. Even though I found myself in a new place upon its release, Bloom served the same function, on morning subway rides and trips out to the coast. There are better songs on that album — “Wild” and “Irene” — but “Wishes” is a proud bronze. The drums propel the song forward, while the guitar makes all of the passing scenery seem larger than it actually is. But what puts this over the top is the intimacy Victoria Legrand’s singing conjures. Her voice might become loud at points on “Wishes,” but the slow delivery and surrounding keyboard make the whole song sound hugely personal. It’s perfect for people who like staring out of train windows and thinking as the landscape zooms by. 
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Al Shipley: I generally hold my tongue regarding this band because they’re pretty much the biggest thing going in a scene I cover regularly and I just don’t get it. But eh, this one is at least a little less gauzey and vague than most of their other songs, has some semblance of a rhythm track that actually gets more prominent toward the end of the song. I still feel like I’m inside some kind of dreadfully boring cabaret, though. 
[5]

Anthony Easton: I never quite know why (maybe it’s the harmonies, maybe the wistfulness), but Beach House has struck me for a while as a reworking of the Beach Boys. This work, where the vocals are slower and the instrumentation is starker, betrays that thesis.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Bloom is Chez Plage’s best album despite tracks like “Wishes,” which are the aural equivalent of dust motes spinning in a shaft of sunlight instead of the crashing waves suggested by the untastesful guitar solo. Aiming for a tone worthy of her surname, Victoria Legrande is way too regal.
[6]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I adore the video — we keep coming back to it at our house, played in-between our re-watching of Twin Peaks. It just works. We’re not even fans of Beach House, but this song is a stand-out, pushing their usual sleeeeepy generic indie sound over the edge just so. It’s likely helped from the fact that I can’t separate the song from the video at this point. I doubt its staying power, though — for me and for anyone else who hears it, even if they’re totally in love with it. Good stuff for now.
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Ian Mathers: The tricky thing about featuring Ray Wise in your video is you have to make sure that having Ray Wise in your video doesn’t become the most interesting thing about your song. There are Beach House songs that could manage that (“Take Care,” for one), but this isn’t it. It doesn’t help that the oft-repeated central images of “wishes on a wheel” mean nothing to me, literally or emotionally.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Pitchfork felt it necessary, in the Bloom review, to tell us what the magic hour is. And Eric Wareheim’s video deigns to explain high-school football to the uninitiated. That’s actually perfect: this is arena rock for aesthetes-in-training: grandly wispy, unfussy, static to a tragic fault. The tom rolls are completely boned; at least the solo recognizes it can’t add to the proceedings.
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Pretty, glimmering, nuanced forgettability. BNM, guys! B-N-frigging-M!
[5]

Will Adams: “One in your life/It happens once and rarely twice” is the crushing surprise amidst the pillowy synth pads and washed out guitar. I wish we’d just skipped the questions and gotten to that line sooner, but the journey ’til then is pleasant enough that I’m happy to nod along.
[6]

Crystal Leww: I could fall asleep to this, but I mean that in a “wow this is so boring” kind of way.
[4]

Jer Fairall: A shower of synths reminiscent of the ones that usher out Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” as her robot voice sputters to a stop, only here stretched over an entire song that only otherwise has a brief flash of unexpectedly propulsive guitar to break up the flow of its pretty, though sleepy, slow motion whirl. The voice, less piercing here than I tend to find it, and the words remain a bit too careful not to call attention to themselves; is it any wonder that I find their music far more interesting when Abel Tesfaye is warping their tasteful exoticism into something far more depraved?
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Scott Mildenhall: A real shame that the vocals are a bit too flat in places here to not slightly sully the beautiful backing. It’s not quite a curate’s egg, but those incongruities are noticeable, and a little grating. An instrumental would probably be preferable.
[7]

Sabina Tang: Much like Dum Dum Girls’ “Coming Down” last year, “Wishes” has been granted a new promotional video a good ten months after its home album, in what seems a pure share-of-mind maintenance play. In contrast to “Coming Down”‘s case, I was not on the ball in May 2012, so have heard Bloom in its entirety only this past week. As a first impression, “Wishes” is the second or third best song on it — not that the album presents much in the way of differentiation. It’s the stateliest segment of one hour-long romantic swoon. Referential home territory: recent Dum Dum Girls with less muscular vocals, or a slowed-down The Pains of Being Pure at Heart with stubbornly indie drum programming. Mixtape sense memory: night sky curving over a deserted white-sand beach, so many stars that familiar constellations become difficult to trace, and one’s orientation comes unmoored. The overall effect is improved to the extent that one assumes Victoria Legrand’s velvety contralto enfolds some conceptual darkness in its layers of reverb. Anyone who’s seen Park Chan-wook’s hothouse-gorgeous Stoker will understand when I say that the ending insert song was oh-very-well, but it really should have been this. Or even better, “Wild”.        
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