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10:11 · 1,659 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The influence is measurable in search data: Google Trends shows the phrase dream pop spiking every time Beach House release an album.
▶ 00:00:28
- The term originally described bands that sound nothing like them, starting with My Bloody Valentine, whose guitarist effectively invented a technique of holding the whammy bar while strumming to produce a wavering tone.
▶ 00:01:04
- Dream pop and shoegaze were near-interchangeable at the time, the second name coming from guitarists staring down at their overloaded pedalboards.
▶ 00:01:58
- By the new millennium the scene had stopped, overtaken by grunge and Britpop, with most of the original bands no longer making records, until M83 and Sweet Trip revived it with glitchy electronics.
▶ 00:02:34
- Beach House got their haze from the opposite method. The guitar is sparse and clean through a single reverb pedal with a finger slide, and the fog comes from the lo-fi recording setup and the electric organ.
▶ 00:03:05
- Victoria Legrand's contralto is the structural difference, a low voice placed at the front where the genre normally buries sopranos and falsettos in the texture.
▶ 00:03:41
- They kept the atmosphere and the melodic approach of their 1990s forebears while dropping the effects that gave shoegaze its name, which is why the second label stuck and the first did not.
▶ 00:04:15
- Both members are indifferent to the genre tag, one saying he does not care about it and the other calling it harmless unless you make an issue of it.
▶ 00:04:53
- Teen Dream is the break, with the signing to Sub Pop, the lo-fi fog gone, live drums added, and the vocal delivery settled into one of the decade's most recognisable voices.
▶ 00:05:07
- The conclusion is an inversion worth keeping: with that consistency and that relentless association, Beach House did not become dream pop so much as dream pop became Beach House.
▶ 00:07:04