Beach House’s parallel universe

“You should see, there’s a place I want to take you,” calls Beach House singer and organist Victoria Legrand in the opening number from the band’s fifth album, Depression Cherry. This simple invitation is the beginning of an aural and emotional journey into the parallel universe that the dream pop duo creates and inhabits. The song is appropriately titled “Levitation,” for to listen to Beach House is to float out of this world and into theirs, as if by magic. As the record plays on, the music leads deeper and deeper into the heart of the band’s territory, further and further from material reality.

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Layers of vintage organs, diffused synthesizers, and slide guitar create an unearthly landscape populated with haunting images like melting buildings in “Sparks” and a Peter Pan-like woman who casts no shadow in “10:37.” As in every Beach House record, this one is dense with deceptively simple lyrics encapsulating enormous feeling. When Legrand echoes herself, repeating “there is no right time” or “fall back into place” or “I would not ever try to capture you,” she delivers the lines with mystical force, speaking to the listener across space and time, providing an abstract mantra to soothe any one of life’s many and varied pains.

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Depression Cherry is an escape route to another realm, not only for listeners but also for Legrand and her bandmate, guitarist Alex Scally. The two describe the process of making music as trance-like, getting deep into their zone and emerging on the other side with a completed song, unable to describe exactly how it was formed. Creating from this intensely personal and withdrawn place has helped them resist some of the outside pressures acting on their vision over the years.

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Beach House began in 2004 in a quiet house in Baltimore at 3 a.m., when the two started playing with Scally’s organ collection and wrote what would become the first song on their 2006 self-titled debut. Together they crafted the Beach House sound from a shared solitude captured in lo-fi basement recording sessions. The commercial success of the group’s third and fourth albums, Teen Dream (2010) and Bloom (2012), meant bigger audiences and bigger stages, and it had physical and psychic effects on the music. On Depression Cherry, however, Beach House retreats from the din and back to its core, focusing on its signature keyboard- and drum machine-driven style and — per the liner notes — “fully ignoring the commercial context in which they exist.”

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Even the LP itself has been stripped down with elegant packaging that represents and complements the simpler sounds within. The vinyl is clear and encased in a red velvet sleeve, like a crystal ensconced in a fuzzy crimson nebula. “We realized that we really didn’t want an image to represent the record,” says Scally. “It felt like an image had too much information. So we realized we prefer this idea of having it be something really physical, that you just see and feel, without the added narrative that images create. And it feels perfect for that record for us.”

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Audiences can expect a similar aesthetic during the band’s current tour. Though Beach House will continue to play in larger spaces — such as the Buckhead Theatre, a new venue for the duo and more spacious than the Variety Playhouse or the Earl, where they have previously performed — the band has scaled down the theatrics and keeps the sets intimate. “It’s not about entertaining people in a cheap, kind of Vegas-y way,” Scally says. “As soon as the show starts and we start using our lights and the things we’ve created, we’re not trying to wow or dazzle people. It’s more like we’re trying to make you enter our universe as quickly as possible.”

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Every set list will differ according to what each crowd wants to hear. Fans can request their favorite songs using an online Setlist Creator, and Scally and Legrand will incorporate the highest ranked selections into the lineup they want to play that night. “It’s very interesting,” says Scally. “Sometimes a certain song will be the top song in a certain city, and then the next day, two hours away, in another city, it won’t even be in the top 20. I don’t know why that is.”

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No two journeys into Beach House’s realm are the same.

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When the show is over and Beach House moves along to the next city, carrying its world away with it, the lines of Depression Cherry’s final song, “Days of Candy,” may linger in the air, reverberating through the crowds as they exit and disperse: “I know it comes too soon,” Legrand sings, “The universe is riding off with you.”