Beach House Keep the Cool, Battle Time and Bitter Cold in New York

Beach House love their question marks -- the punctuation that seems to end every stark, enigmatic, painfully pretty string of words and bar of music -- but the Baltimore duo knows a few things for sure.

"Everybody cool," lead singer and keyboardist Victoria Legrand said Wednesday night at New York City's Webster Hall, where she and guitarist Alex Scally played the first of two shows scheduled for this week.

Legrand wasn't taking the room's temperature. She knew without needing to ask that everyone in the sold-out club was calm and collected, well settled into a mood whose color equivalent was sea-foam green, just like her oversized Chrissie Hynde blazer.

It was a statement of fact: Everybody was cool, and so they would remain for the duration of the 15-song set.

Beach House performed at Webster Hall last spring, and introducing 'Used to Be,' one of the band's more sing-songy, lullaby-like tunes, Legrand made note of how different things felt this time around. "Something is happening in the world," she said. "We're all getting older faster."

If anything stands a chance of slowing the passage of time, its Beach House's music. Even with the addition of a touring drummer, the group makes gentle, methodical dream-pop, layering Legrand's soap-opera organ and husky vocals atop mallet-driven beats and Scally's shivering guitar leads.

On opener 'Gila,' from 2008's 'Devotion,' Legrand was like a brunette Stevie Nicks filling in for Julee Cruise in that creepy rockabilly band that does residency at the Roadhouse on 'Twin Peaks.' An electronic hip-hop beat clattered beneath 'Master of None,' but still the song moved with a kind of drowsy elegance. Nicks once sang about how "thunder only happens when it's raining," but with Beach House, the proper weather metaphor tends to be light drizzle and gray, quiet skies -- perfect conditions for quiet reflection.

'Zebra,' the lead track on the duo's 2010 stunner 'Teen Dream,' was something of an exception, its mysterious ache building and building throughout the song, ending with a sweeping guitar riff and chorus that suggested movement: "Any way you run/you run before us."

"We all came out in this bitter cold together," Legrand said during the encore, again offering listeners a way out of their own heads and into something like a communal experience. "We just need some contact."

Beach House Perform 'Zebra' on the Interface


Watch Beach House's Full Interface Set