CD reviews 5/15: Beach House and Best Coast

POP/ROCK: Beach House, "Bloom" (Sub Pop)

Beach House's music can be so beautifully dreamy as to be soporific. There aren't a lot of tempo changes or stylistic shifts going on from song to song or album to album, as French-born singer Victoria Legrand's somewhat androgynous vocals take flight on patiently soaring melodies that rise over repetitive keyboard washes decorated with Alex Scally's always subtle slide guitar embellishments. "Bloom," the Baltimore-based band's fourth album, stays the course last heard on 2010's captivating "Teen Dream," as Legrand and Scully expertly evoke a swooning, melancholic "strange paradise" that luxuriates, as "Wishes" puts it, in "the moment that memory aches." When you first put it on, the album can seem like mere mood music, but as it builds, "Bloom" opens up with vibrant emotional impact.

DAN DELUCA, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

POP/ROCK: Best Coast, "The Only Place"

(Mexican Summer)

"The Only Place," title and opening track of Best Coast's second album, threatens to obliterate everything that comes after it. It's a love letter to Bethany Cosentino's native California, and a bright sunburst of irresistible power pop, full of zippy acoustic strumming, reverberating surf-guitar and twangy fingerpicking. "Why would you live anywhere else but here?," Cosentino asks, in an open challenge.

Best Coast's debut, 2009's "Crazy for You," found the duo lumped with other lo-fi, '60s girl-group-obsessed bands such as Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls. This time out, Cosentino and partner Bobb Bruno up their game by enlisting mastermind producer Jon Brion, who gives the album a lively, immediate clarity without diminishing Cosentino's youthful charm. The ballads sometimes seem like placeholders, but the next blast of summery power pop always comes quickly.

POP/ROCK: Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, "Thick as a Brick 2" (Chrysalis)

OK, it won me over. After several listenings, some alongside Jethro Tull's original, famous/ notorious 1972 smash "Thick as a Brick" (40 years old this year), I gotta tell ya: This is a fine album, more than worthy of its namesake.

"TAAB2" revisits Gerald Bostock, the little boy who supposedly wrote the impenetrable lyrics for the original "TAAB." The sequel is a direct, coherent, sustained meditation on a worthwhile theme: fate, and possible lives taken or not. The tracks are uniformly interesting and moving, with (or despite?) Anderson's trademark neck-breaking segues among folk, heavy rock, ballad, and Asian modalism.

None of the other old Tulls are here, but Anderson has assembled a team of blindingly talented players. The music is tight, biting, live-in-studio (as the original was!), and Anderson is a better flutist than ever. And lyricist. To call his tunes "busy" is like saying, "There are many tuna," but it's a thrill ride.