MP3 | Beach House — ‘Norway’

Purveyors of the most dizzyingly dreamy pop music around, organist/singer Victoria Legrand and guitarists Alex Scally are back with another track of breathtakingly fragile beauty, lifted from their ultra-hyped 2010 release Teen Dream. It’s not surprising to discover that ‘Norway’ was written on a long bus journey through the Norwegian mountains – it’s as cinematic and achingly expansive as its namesake. Victoria may sing beguilingly about “the season of the sun”, but you can almost feel the frostbite. A perfect example of how to do widescreen glacial pop, the song’s rushing melody rides waves of cascading, muted synths and twitching, fairground electronics before breaking into a heartbreakingly yearning chorus of the sort to shame Nico, swathed in layers of spiralling guitars and pounding drums. In short, it’s fantastic.

Perhaps the one flaw in Beach House’s previous works is that, by wrapping their songs in layers of gauzy, tissue-paper wooziness, they often obscured the raw emotion throbbing behind each of their tracks. ‘Norway’ lays it bare and is all the more heartbreaking for it. Gone are the trickling, twee organ notes and plucked guitar chords of old, Beach House have gone panoramic. And it suits them.

Teen Dream
01 Zebra
02 Silver Soul
03 Norway
04 Walk In The Park
05 Used To Be
06 Lover Of Mine
07 Better Times
08 10 Mile Stereo
09 Real Love
10 Take Care

FREE MP3: Beach House, ‘Norway’

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