Decent dream pop: Beach House’s Once Twice Melody reviewed

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Matthew Lynn

The minimum wage is too high

Everything these days devolves to prog — and not always very good prog. Where once synths were vastly expensive, difficult to master and hell to maintain they are now in a place beyond ubiquity; every sound you want conjured by the press of a key, your song suddenly washed over with sonics that make it sound more important than it really is. It almost makes you yearn for Yes and ELP — at least they knew they were pretentious dullards using electronic wizardry to elevate the slightest of compositions.

Dream pop and its self-harming kid sister shoe-gazing — both genres dating from the mid-1980s and the likes of the Cocteau Twins — were always going to lend themselves to prog’s grandiosity. Victoria Legrand — niece of the pianist Michel Legrand — and Alex Scally are probably the last two middle-class white folk still living in Baltimore.