Beach House, live at the Museum of Fine Arts, December 10, 2008
By DANIEL BROCKMAN | December 19, 2008
HELLO, DARKNESS: Victoria Legrand was right to ask for less light. |
"No, seriously, can you turn them down?" A few songs into their set at the MFA's Remis Auditorium Friday, Beach House's Victoria Legrand gave a second, graver plea for less light, and for a moment we wondered what would happen if the lighting guy didn't comply. It wasn't exactly bright in the room to begin with, but as the band trudged funereally through their lugubrious dreamscapes, a request of "Let there be less light" made more and more sense.
With shuffling and echoing programmed beats, spindly guitar lines, and keyboards set to haunting pre-sets, each song was like another go-round on a particularly morbid amusement park ride, where voices reverberated longingly and you could see the next part while still hearing the previous one off in the distance. Guitarist Alex Scally's glistening fingerwork played in conjunction with the slow pulse of the electronic beats and Legrand's offhandedly eerie lilt, and the songs were delivered like a series of waves, the force cresting and breaking, then slowly subsiding, only to rebuild again at a steady pace.
"Pick apart the past, you're not going back," sang Legrand in "Gila" (from 2008's Devotion), summing up the mood of stunned regret and nonchalant sadness. If you were there to get energized or rocked, you'd have been bored shitless as the band coated the mostly bescarfed crowd with their aural codeine. But if you went to find transcendent hope in a morass of sadness, this performance hit sublime pinnacles that some need drugs to reach.
Related:
Here comes the Whambulance, Voice of regeneration, David Hilliard at Carroll and Sons, More 
- Here comes the Whambulance
The Baltimore loft once known as Wham City is long dead, its inhabitants evicted in 2007, but the twisted DIY art movement it housed has flourished nonetheless.
- Voice of regeneration
Havens, who comes to the MFA this Sunday, has been following his muse since he was a child.
- David Hilliard at Carroll and Sons
It's not every day that a guy like me gets to enjoy a photographic investigation of daddy-boy relationships. . . . well, outside of a naughty format.
- Slideshow: X-ray reveals secrets of Tintoretto's painting
Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting Nativity , in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, has long puzzled scholars because of its odd composition.
- Viva Modernism
Long before the threat of swine flu, Mexico was the scene of an outbreak of a very different kind: Modernism.
- Make a run for the border
In August 1923, photographer Edward Weston left his wife and three of his four sons in Los Angeles and headed to Mexico City.
- Slideshow: Two Mexican exhibits at MFA
"Viva Mexico!" with "Vida y Drama"
- Photos: 'Seeing Songs' at MFA
Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs at the MFA
- More than a feeling
The centerpiece of the Museum of Fine Arts' "Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs" is Candice Breitz's 2005 Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), a wall of 30 televisions, each showing a different Madonna fan singing a cappella to her 1990 greatest-hits compilation, The Immaculate Collection. They wear headphones, bob their heads, sing aloud to music we can't hear.
- Splendor on the screen
The arc of Elia Kazan's professional life has its origins in the Group Theatre, where he was trained as an actor and performed in the original 1930s productions of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy .
- Legally previewed
Here’s a look at some of January and February’s more anticipated releases and their legally available free previews.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Alex Scally, Victoria Legrand, Victoria Legrand, More
, Alex Scally, Victoria Legrand, Victoria Legrand, beach house, MFA, remis auditorium, Beach House (Musical Group), Less
