Devotion Review

The improvement is real and modest. There is more room in the recording, Legrand's voice has come forward and gained authority, and Scally's guitar lines have started to do actual counterpoint rather than just adding shimmer. Gila is the standout by some distance, a slow spiral built on a two note figure that gets under the skin and stays there, and it is the first Beach House song that sounds like it could fill a hall.

Heart of Chambers and Holy Dances have real tunes. Wedding Bell is charming. The difficulty is uniformity: eleven tracks at roughly the same tempo in roughly the same register, with lyrics that stay in a fog of vague romance and half remembered images. It washes over you, and that is the intention, but at forty seven minutes the intention becomes a limitation. Two years later they solved the problem completely. This is the last of the small records and the best of them.