Anticipation comes haunted by the feeling that what you’re waiting for will never come on “New Year,” the latest video selection from Beach House’s excellent 2012 album Bloom. That’s one read on the Baltimore dream-poppers’ typically impressionistic lyrics here, but it’s also a mood carried over by the music, particularly that moment after the first chorus, when a shoegaze-bent hum hangs over the simple drum pattern like a cartoon character who’s just gone off a cliff. The duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally is decidedly not a narrative-oriented band, but “New Year” glidingly tells the story of a story: “Just enough to tell a story ’bout a / Portrait of a / Young girl waiting for the end of an era.” The video, with a welcome surfeit of cat footage, uses time-lapse techniques to tell the story of Beach House recording Bloom at Texas’ Sonic Ranch Studios. “It’s more of a home video thing, not a music video,” the band says on YouTube. And now let’s say it for the last time until 2014: Happy New Year.
Beach House’s Time-Lapse ‘New Year’ Video Is Just Enough to Tell a Story
