Meredith Graves is a musician and writer. She also runs a small record label called Honor Press. You can follow her on Twitter here and on Instagram here.
bloom
A Depressed Person Reviews Beach House’s Depression Cherry
There’s a tradition being established of the way people are supposed to write about Beach House: Their music is sad enough to rid writers of their desire to report, letting go of tired buzzwords in favor of meandering, highly personal prose poetry, often focused on tragedy and sadness. Beach House has helped a lot of sensitive people understand that we have the God-given right to hold on to our trauma as long as we want, to openly admit to revisiting over and over a record that reminds us exactly where we’re broken, to remove the bandage, defeated, and wave it like a white flag. As Meagan Fredette wrote in Medium: “Their lyrics give me a voice where I’ve felt too broken to speak.”
Sure. The quieter and more unassuming and open-ended the thing, the easier it is to assign that thing meaning. Beach House lyrics are vague and bottomless. There’s something there that isn’t quite a narrative; you can’t put your finger on what it is, but in the great tradition of naming, you have to call it something. You call it yours.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. In Jill Mapes’ recently published profile of Beach House for Pitchfork, she paints a picture of singer Victoria Legrand gazing heavy-lidded into the void right alongside the rest of us:
Nursing an Amstel, Scally watches his bandmate struggle to articulate the overarching themes of Depression Cherry, their forthcoming fifth album. As she grasps for more concrete language, it’s as if the words to describe her creative state of mind simply do not exist. If they did, she’d use them — Legrand isn’t trying to be aloof or mysterious, qualities often attributed to Beach House’s music and members— and she admits as much.
On “Levitation,” the album-opener, she sings of an unknown that surrounds her. Legrand has, on a previous record, asked us directly if we could “help [her] to name it.” But here on Depression Cherry, their fifth album, which (as everyone has already said) sounds exactly like the previous four, what else could possibly be left that they haven’t explored, that hasn’t been named, that they don’t already know?
________________________
Since February, I’ve been medicated for depression accompanied by fairly severe anxiety. I’ve got far more than five albums’ worth of history with this particular struggle, but despite this intimacy, I also still feel surrounded by an unknown unknown.
“How do you describe that in language without sounding completely abstract and out of your mind?” Legrand asks in the Pitchfork piece.
Good question. And I was told not two days ago by someone I love that one of my most troubling qualities is the mania I fall into when I have to admit I don’t know something. He insisted that part of growing up is being willing to admit (and eventually embrace) just how much about the world — and specifically your part in it — is and will remain unknown to you.
________________________
The band chose “Sparks” as its first single following the announcement of Depression Cherry. The reaction was tremendous; people treated this as possible evidence that Beach House was finally taking on a new sound. It sounds like Angelo Badalamenti writing for Arcade Fire.
________________________
Stereogum critic Caitlin White calls what we experience when listening to Beach House “the pleasure we take in the very tragic,” while Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene says the band “explores the sadness of pleasure, and the pleasure of sadness.” People on Genius are hypothesizing that the lyrics to “Sparks” are actually about Beach House’s experience living in Baltimore, “a city with a history of economic inequality and entire neighborhoods of vacant homes in various states of disrepair.”
If so, there’s certainly no pleasure to be found there, maybe save for the fact that the band likely won’t ever have to experience firsthand that kind of destitution and institutional violence. If all that is true, then “Sparks” is the sonic equivalent of Pinterest mom blogs that tell you to sneak broccoli into your vegetable-averse child’s milkshakes, where it will likely go completely unnoticed under a mountain of sugar.
I didn’t know much about Beach House before this song was released. Triggered by the single’s release, the person who first played “Sparks” for me, someone I care about tremendously, brought home Bloom (2012) on LP. Then, I started, as many do, to organize my thoughts in it.
________________________
A good friend recently explained to me her Jacket Theory of Relationships:
Beach House has been wearing the same jacket since 2006: the zipper breaks, the lining asses out, countless people borrow it and stretch out the elbows, and somehow the thing still looks good, effortless — but only on them.
When something starts to wear through, you can either get rid of it or love it in spite of whatever weathering it’s sustained in the time you’ve had it. Find more signs of life in the fraying corners. If only.
Who will dry your eyes
When it falls apart?
When you’re in the middle of a staring contest with massive depression, the answer to this and questions like it (and actually, every question, because depression makes us Narcissi, one iteration of the “pleasure of sadness”) is always me, me, me. I’ll be drying my own eyes, because I’ll be alone. Suddenly it hits me: maybe I’m just too tight in the forearms.
________________________
This morning I watched a film from 1990 called The Double Life of Véronique, in which two young women, Weronika (a Polish opera singer), and Véronique (a French music teacher), played by the same actress, both have subtle but firm convictions that they’re living double lives, despite living in different countries and never having met. They do cross paths, but only for a moment. When Weronika dies on stage while singing in a choral performance, Véronique, back in France, feels a terrible sympathetic sadness.
She tells a man she loves, a puppeteer, “All my life I’ve felt like I was here and somewhere else at the same time.” It’s tangible, her resignation, the recognition that the acute void within her that she’s always sensed has finally been verified.
Victoria Legrand sings, in “Beyond Love,” of there being “no change in his vision sprung into dreams.” The Dream Girl, quirky and sad and hopelessly static, exists to further the story of the male protagonist. In most cases, this necessitates a totally unrealistic set of circumstances wherein said woman sets away her real sadness and strangeness, or at least downplays it dramatically, in order to devote her full self to the man’s unchanging vision.
I’ve always liked to think about what goes on with the girl when the cameras stop rolling, when the male gaze abates, the girl beyond love or outside of it, still primarily concerned with the void, who steps out of the plot to flop across her bed, puts on Depression Cherry and stares at the ceiling, wondering how she got entangled with yet another man who can whistle some Miles Davis, who’s read some Frank O’Hara, who is so proud of his tailored shirts.
This girl offscreen is a pair of bookends that prop up albums like Depression Cherry and films such as The Double Life of Véronique. They are for us and cannot exist without us.
______________________
Depression makes you feel like you, too, are always somewhere else, in addition to being wherever you are. The better part, the part that could maybe be loved someday, is off in France with a slightly shorter bob, teaching children to play violin without you. You’re here, and you’re fine enough, you’re just fantastically fucking tender and that’s off-putting to some possible lovers. Legrand, in “Beyond Love,” is probably singing “of a world left without it,” but it sounds like “of a world left without him.”
Beyond love
This thing comes to me
Heartbreak did this
He was made to believe
That he should live without it
I really wanna know, she sings, and damn it, there are things I really wanna know, and Veronique wants to know things too. I start crying.
Caryn James, in the New York Times, wrote that “Veronique is poetic in the truest sense, relying on images that can’t be turned into prosaic statements without losing something of their essence. The film suggests mysterious connections of personality and emotion, but it was never meant to yield any neat, summary idea about the two women’s lives.”
The same is true of Depression Cherry, and of Beach House as a project, and of all Dream Girls the world over. The lyrics are simple enough, and the character undefined enough, to handle the weight of whatever the listener offloads onto her — here she comes, all parts of everything. Open-ended as a horoscope.
The quality of Legrand’s voice, Badalamentian, conjures the memory of the dead and pretty blonde teen Laura Palmer. Expired before Twin Peaks begins, described throughout in vague and short flashbacks, her inner life a mystery to her family and friends, she is also all parts of everything. All we really know for most of the series — the characteristic that defines her entire personality — is that someone was compelled to violently rape and kill her.
Slowly, over the course of the series, we find out that Laura Palmer was a very, very sad young woman who led two separate, distinct lives. Her reality — who she was, what she wanted — is and remains unsummarized. Audrey Horne and Donna want to know. But Laura Palmer, even in her private diaries, never intended any neat and truthful summary either.
We lie
We lie
Sad ones keep secrets. We suppress the depression, our sense that we’re always somewhere else, our other self or selves. We shelve it.
________________________
And we often diagnose the problem incorrectly, to ourselves and others, as being impossible to put into words. My new therapist, who I’m currently avoiding, asks vague, open-ended questions about my early teenage years, presumably trying to get me to describe the place in my past where she thinks my sadness hides. And Legrand says of the record, “It’s really whatever the listener will feel in response to it.”
Depression Cherry is a Rorschach blot made for sad girls — not the ones who die, like Weronika and Laura Palmer, but those who usually exist to further the plot of other characters, who live their fullest, truest, and saddest lives when the cameras stop rolling. It’s as generic and widely prescribed as Prozac, big enough to fit all of us, engineered to serve as entrance and exit music, carrying us into and out of the room (maybe the one with the yellow wallpaper). All-purpose, it helps us build community and solidarity around that undefinable factor. Just for us, everyone.
In truth (and in secret), it is often easier to seek comfort in albums and films where we feel represented and seen than it is to ask for help for a problem we can’t even name. Since the experience of being depressed is so hyper-individualized and utterly entangled with this undefinable quality, it’s very hard to get other people to understand what we’re going through. Depression is, as Legrand found her album to be, impossible to describe without sounding totally crazy. We feel, by the end, when we’re done projecting our own problems into her words, that we are in this with her.
________________________
Unlike most of my life, when I’ve dealt with depressive episodes by receding into myself, I have as of late been relying heavily on my friends for support. I no longer want to be alone in this. It even sort of feels OK to cry in front of other people.
So I listened to Depression Cherry for the first time on my guitar player’s couch, drinking a beer and staring at his new pet lizard sunning itself on a rock. Around the 37-minute mark (I know because my eyes got big and I wrote this down as soon as I said it), I looked at him and said, “It’s almost over and I feel like nothing’s really happened.”
Two days later, I finally do what I want and exactly what’s expected of me. I put on The Double Life of Veronique and switch the sound to mute. I press play on Depression Cherry. I call it mine.
