on beach house

“Welcome to the intense part of the evening,” Victoria Legrand, the singer/keyboardist for Baltimore duo Beach House, vamped in her smoky alto during a stunning set at New York’s Mercury Lounge Monday night. Decked out in a camel-and-navy Laurel Canyon circa 1973 suit, Legrand opened up her voice wide — her vocals are infinitely stronger than the group’s hazy, reverbed debut would ever suggest — with a handful of songs from Beach House and four new tunes that rival all but “Apple Orchard” and “Master of None” from that debut.

I’ve now seen Beach House three times. The first at a Williamsburg coffee shop during CMJ last October. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, the late afternoon sun dripping in through stained glassy windows, the low hum of a coffee grinder offering an approving accompaniment and Legrand and guitarist/organist Alex Scally peering from beneath the high ceilings and the weight of their “waterlogged” compositions — as coworker and 17 Dots contributor Rob Wetstone called them, not entirely kindly — to sing these perfectly delicate, incredibly personal songs to a rapt crowd of maybe 30. None of us wanted it to end.

The second time was at Tonic, also in New York, a few months ago. The crowd there was a bit less attentive — it’s admittedly tougher standing than sitting — but it was the closing show of a two-month tour for the band, and they were playful, almost mad with the delirium of finally being rid of The Road, back to normal meals and consistent bedding and a chance to rest their minds and bodies. Legrand clapped and swayed like an oblivious white-girl Stevie Wonder impression, and Scally stamped his boot with genuine fervor.

I cannot in good faith call Beach House a good live act. Their stage presence is very amateurish though cute — huddling like a Peewee offense between songs — and anything less than a dedicated audience can kill the whole deal; you have to really hear it to appreciate it, and the closer you can be to the stage, where you don’t have to squint to see Legrand’s terrifically cute facial throws, the better.

They sound a lot like the record, live. The backing tracks — the sluggish beat coming from a MacBook and some atmospherics — are identical to the record, and musically, the pair plays it pretty straight. The big differentiator, though, is Legrand’s voice. Based on Beach House, you might understandably pin her as yet another weak-voiced indie sister, someone with better taste than chops and a flair for the atmospheric. But here’s the disservice that the band’s aesthetic and all that reverb brings: Legrand has an absolutely incredible voice, and objectively so. Though certainly of a type — in the ‘60s she would’ve been a Motown-influenced soul singer, in the ‘70s a singer-songwriter and in the ‘80s fronting a new wave band — she can sing absolutely anything, and do it with a shocking amount of vocal power and conviction.

The four new songs the band played last night showcased that, especially one that sounded like the Beach Boys writing Christmas songs, which has become my favorite Beach House song, period. Others keep up the Christmas-y feel, but with a more consciously classic rock epic mood: if Beach House were a dimly lit studio apartment, the next record will be a dramatically hued, multi-level duplex. And yet the spirit of the band, personal, introspective, considered, survives and, indeed, thrives in these new songs. I would have paid whatever money I had in my wallet for the privilege to walk out of the Mercury Lounge with those songs in my pocket.

This is a whole lot of words on Beach House, I know, and probably more than anyone will read, but for the past six months their music has been a part of my life. I look back at my eMusic review, hastily written as I listened to the record for the third or fourth time, and I cringe. I got it entirely wrong, from the background (totally irrelevant — I outsmarted myself) to song lyrics (she sings “To pluck the feathers from all the birds,” not whatever the hell I was hearing) to I don’t even know what else. But sometimes mistakes should stand, and so there those premature thoughts sit.

Instead I should have simply said: This is music for life. It sounds like what you might hear as you raise through that white tunnel toward whatever afterlife awaits us. It is precious — hold it tightly, protect it — but slippery, like dancing with smoke, to borrow a phrase from the eMusic-famous Michael Brennan. It is music that, for a certain person (and I am one of them), will mean everything. More than anything, I am grateful for this album. And I want moremoremore.

If you haven’t seen them, you should. They have a few more dates left on their tour, and you can check them out here at their MySpace page.