Once Twice Melody
| Beach House
Once Twice Melody
Once Twice Melody is the eighth studio album by the American dream pop duo Beach House, released on February 18, 2022. It is a double albumof 18 songs, presented in four chapters. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
On the cinematic title track of their latest album, the duo delve back into the infinite possibility of our dreams.
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The Guardian
a seductive odyssey in four chapters.
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Medium
The influential dreampop duo’s eighth album proves their largest in scale to date.
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The Fire Note
As Beach House gets close to two decades of recording, Once Twice Melody seems to celebrate all that is great and fun about their sound as it has developed on recent outings, while suggesting areas of movement and growth still to come.
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Paste Magazine
Beach House Make Their Grandest Statement Yet with Once Twice Melody.
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Stereogum
By trusting themselves and each other, Beach House have maintained a remarkable career that is exceedingly rare by industry standards. In an increasingly unstable world, it’s a relief to escape into theirs.
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No Ripcord
Weaving in dustier threads to Beach House’s ever shimmery fabric proves that the cyborgian approach of mixing the organic with the mechanical is an increasingly winning formula. Not to make too much of Beach House’s reclamation of the sounds that marked the heyday of the earlier days of the space race for the innocents and the dreamers, but today such pursuits are given over to megalomaniacal billionaires. Legrand and Scally are here, phasers in hand, to take it back in grand style to the day when, as they succinctly put it on Illusion of Forever, “Sailing to the stars, I wonder why it’s so hard.”
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Beats Per Minute
By the time Once Twice Melody reaches its closing moments, it sounds like the band are taking a well-earned victory lap in a career full of wins.
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AV Club
Beach House spreads some of its most impressive work across the four chapters of Once Twice Melody.
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Treblezine
As much as any Beach House album is about finding new places to explore—or perhaps more accurately escape—within their hypnotic lullabies, Once Twice Melody is Beach House at their most uninhibited and playful, seemingly trying different things for the fun of it and by and large succeeding.
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DIY Magazine
The impatient will find ‘Once Twice Melody’ a tad wishy-washy, but for those who persevere there’s still a lot going on beneath the waves.
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AllMusic
Equally comforting and creative moments like this give Once Twice Melody the heart to match its ambition, and the way different songs stand out on each listen reaffirms that Beach House's consistency is the opposite of predictable.
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Commedia
“Once Twice Melody” is a fairytale. With some of the most immersive and captivating music released by the duo in years, it seems like a warm hug being received by a loved one after not seeing them for a while. It is hard to not get lost in the beautiful fantasy that they have created, and it is even harder trying to not come back.
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Louder Than War
With its initial four-chapter concept, the record sounds better when discovered in parts. If one decides to take it in at one gulp, Once Twice Melody might seem a bit much. Although each sequence of tracks seemingly has a unifying mood and vibe alluding to the month of their release, it is difficult to keep the focus and see the structure. If Beach House intended to create a soundtrack to mind-wandering, this would hit the bull’s eye.
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The Rice Thresher
An album that simultaneously expresses the endlessness of a galaxy and the sheltered ephemerality of your childhood bedroom floor, “Once Twice Melody” transcends the traditional elements of shoegaze — creating not only a wall of sound but one of sensation.
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Sputnik Music
Album highlight “Superstar” tilts its head laconically, spellbindingly non-committal as it glides through the motions of everything ever worth loving about Beach House. There’s a lesson here: this band can take their aesthetics as far as they like, but they’ll always be just that.
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Magnetic Magazine
Once Twice Melody is Beach House at their sublime best. They capture dream sequences, incepting them into your brain to hum away for a long time. It is blissed out and psychedelic, easing from one song to the next. This is an album to get lost in and enveloped like sitting in an oversized beanbag chair.
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The Line of Best Fit
A decade since their magnum opus, Beach House continue elevating their artistry on Once Twice Melody.
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mxdwn Music
Once Twice Melody is a standing testament to a band committed to its sound. Passion shines through every moment, with songs that have the exact notes fans of the genre wish. It’s transcendent, the way that Beach House fans love to listen. It’s them at their highest, taking their sound to lengthy heights. While all might not pay off, it certainly has a feeling of novelty and beauty that they are known for.
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NME
The Baltimore duo's eighth record pairs trippy imagery with playful, cinematic sounds that herald the start of a bold, unpredictable new chapter .
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AllMusic
Equally comforting and creative moments like this give Once Twice Melody the heart to match its ambition, and the way different songs stand out on each listen reaffirms that Beach House's consistency is the opposite of predictable.
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musicOMH
Final track Modern Love Stories plays out with acoustic guitar and strings in tandem, emphasising the new textures that Once Twice Melody has introduced, perhaps not with universal success, but nevertheless there are moments here that rank alongside Beach House’s finest work.
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Stereoboard
Despite containing several utterly delightful moments, ‘Once Twice Melody’ will probably be too much for one sitting unless you stick it on, forget about it and just tune in for the more memorable sections. As such, it probably sits better as four releases rather than one entity and, dare we say it, as a playlist of sorts.
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Commedia
“Once Twice Melody” is a fairytale. With some of the most immersive and captivating music released by the duo in years, it seems like a warm hug being received by a loved one after not seeing them for a while. It is hard to not get lost in the beautiful fantasy that they have created, and it is even harder trying to not come back.
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Pop Goes the Weasel
To me, ‘Once, Twice, Melody’ is the band’s most accomplished record to date. A lot of that has to do with its size – and the fact that they pull it off so successfully. The album tugs at the extremes of the band’s signature sound: the shoegazing is more fixated, the spacey synths enter another orbit, and the dream pop goes into fever dream territory. When it’s languid, it’s heart-breakingly languid. When it’s moody, it’s desperately moody. And while it never gets particularly loud, raucous or energetic, it does contain some of the band’s most electric performances to date.
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Metro Weekly
The Baltimore-based duo Beach House shines on "Once Twice Melody," a vivid and elegiac double album.
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Crack Magazine
Equally exciting is the moody 80s sensibility scattered throughout, channelled in the trickling synths of Hurts to Love and at its best in the minimal wave-esque Masquerade, which chugs, chimes and embraces its rougher edges. It’s these interior moments as much as the cinematic that make Beach House’s return special.
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Hotpress
Throughout, Beach House display impressive attention to sonic detail, especially on the powerful ‘Superstar’ – the album’s standout moment. Once Twice Melody has all you could ask and more from a Beach House album: catchy melodies, high drama and a marvellous sound. One to savour.
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Clash Magazine
The majority of the album is a reverb-heavy soundscape, a mixture of arpeggiated synthesisers, ambient samples, and sequenced drums, with some electric guitar and other percussion mixed in.
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Finest of EDM
Once Twice Melody was split up into four different parts, but it doesn’t stutter and restart with each bit. It is still quite seamless, despite a roll out that could have indicated this was going to shift dramatically between EPs.
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The Needle Drop
Even with its pacing issues, Once Twice Melody is a big W for the dream pop duo.
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The Reflector
Overall, this album creates a feeling of comfort and coziness wherever I find myself listening to it with the sound of dreamy bedroom pop in even the craziest environments. I applaud Beach House for Once Twice Melody and its ability to captivate my attention for an hour and a half.
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XS Noize
With Once, Twice Melody, LeGrand and Scally take on an immense project that is universal in scope but ultimately personal. With the release, they again prove they are the king and queen of Dream Pop displaying all their wares in this challenging project. Fans of the Beach House will not be disappointed, and new listeners will be blown away by the growing abilities of the pair to wow with their epic works.
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Under The Radar Magazine
In actuality, this record, for the most part, feels like Beach House at their most extreme and experimental, something that an album of this length undoubtedly needs. It contrasts warm compositions with cool vocals well throughout, and gives fans a near 90-minute exhibition in the cathartic power of dream pop and shoegaze.
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Music Matters Media
Similarly, the songs of Once Twice Melody are about finding joy from love in a world where reasons to feel joyous feel few and far between. It’s a twisted dreamscape of an album – but, if the end is indeed near, at least it gets to sound this fantastic.
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Pitchfork
With panoramic proportions and gleaming finishes, the band’s sprawling eighth album luxuriates in the rhapsody of sensation itself. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it.
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Gigwise
Once Twice Melody is a grand statement from Beach House that sits together as an extended album, while also offering more bite-sized memorable moments to take away, no doubt leaving plenty to discover on each return.
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Live4Ever
Once Twice Melody lands Beach House in a densely woven musical pattern entirely of their own making. Throughout Legrand and Scally’s creative partnership, their essence has usually been opaque and, whilst offering the longest exposure to it ever here, it’s still impossible to divine whether it’s reached a definitive point.
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Loud and Quiet
It certainly seems to have been a fruitful time; the sprawling, 18-track Once Twice Melody has been drip-fed in four chapters, and curiously, feels alternately like it swings between some of their most experimental work to date – ‘Pink Funeral’ finds room for string-led drama, whilst ‘Sunset’ is led by handsome acoustic guitar – and some of the purest distillations of their hazy dream-pop calling card, too, like the glittering, gently undulating ‘Over and Over’.
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