To me, dream pop has always seemed like an impressionist painting. Individual strokes blend together into a final song; synthesizers and drums meander rather than define. The full scene is hazy and serene, where the pieces move and build. It feels natural, like the light grazing Monet’s gardens or Manet’s canals.
Beach House’s Depression Cherry feels like an unfinished painting, with the first drafts of a background splashed across a canvas and the minor details dabbed into corners. At its best, the album warmly hums through a haze with a feeling of aloof delight. At its worst, it sounds flat and monotonous.
Take opening song “Levitation”: Synthesizers drum a warm tone while singer Victoria Legrand’s voice calls through its layers. It’s dense, with different organs playing through each other’s echoes while a guitar crackles. But there’s no movement behind it; the same drum machines tiptoe through the five-minute waltz. The dynamics that make up Depression Cherry’s finer moments are absent here, and throughout most of the album, where one dreamy song apathetically sways into the next.
But there are finer moments often in those dabbed details. The descending chords in “PPP” gorgeously carry the track through its R&B groove. “10:37” finds Legrand’s vocals aggressively layered, finally emphasizing one of Beach House’s breezier strengths. Lead single “Sparks” has a guitar lead that channels the aggression the Depression Cherry hype-train promised, and “Space Song” has a Space Age sound that slow dances across constellations.
While some moments feel like complete ideas, however, the larger part of the album blends into its backdrop of synthesizers and drum machines, where Legrand slurs her words through a dreamy haze and little else moves. Depression Cherry feels like an unfinished work, one that could’ve been hung in a museum but was left on an easel to be filled in and thrown onto a record. Impressionism sometimes feels borderless between the strokes; borders are something Depression Cherry could’ve used.