No Beach House album is drastically different from the next, but the band experienced a small shift around the turn of the decade. 2010’s Teen Dream elevated them from an indie curiosity into one of the most popular rock-adjacent bands working; 2012 follow-up Bloom debuted in Billboard’s top 10 albums. Their sound grew with their sales and prominence, helped along by length and live drums; Legrand had always been a strong presence, but she transformed into a true force, earthy and fierce.

Depression Cherry is the sound of the band hitting the reset button. Their new songs are smaller, tighter, and more focused on tone than power; the live drums are largely gone. (The band said as much in a press release announcing the record.) Legrand has cut back from full blast, and she’s a livelier presence for it: she dabbles in spoken word, gains some agility, sounds curious and dreamy and dewy in equal measure. It marks a return to the ethos that defined their earliest music with much greater clarity and skill.

The band sounds newly confident and cinematic

And as a conscious reflection on the work they’ve done before, it’s not innovative — but that’s also not the point. Songs like grand opener "Levitation" and sweeping waltz "PPP" are familiar, but they’re newly confident and cinematic; they make you appreciate the band’s ability to iterate on a few key sounds and themes over and over again without compromising their potency. They invite you to recognize the value of consistency, of predictability, of routine excellence.

(Merge)

Those are exactly the sorts of values that must make Dan Bejar’s skin crawl. Bejar is an advocate for stylistic breadth, a walking thesaurus, a wine-sipping raconteur; the only constant in his work is change. A scrappy, witty singer-songwriter from Vancouver, Bejar’s first work of real note was 2001’s jaunty Streethawk: A Seduction, a rip through the music of the British Invasion that name-checked Werner Herzog and Farrar, Straus and Giroux alike. He’d also joined Canadian-American supergroup The New Pornographers by that point, emerging as that group’s dashing, roguish gem thanks to contributions like "Jackie" and "Breakin’ the Law."

From there his restless spirit took hold, and he spent the next decade exploring the possibilities of "indie rock" at its most loose. Your Blues was a startling detour into MIDI orchestration, a whirl of processed flutes and chintzy fake horns; Destroyer’s Rubies was a course correction into rambling, self-referential rock, like Bruce Springsteen stumbling through the looking glass. (A typical highlight is "Looters’ Follies," wherein Bejar takes a moment at the song’s peak to note the song itself has never sounded so good. And he’s right!) No one could’ve predicted the journey’s end: Bejar became a minor star. Released in 2011, Kaputt took the coke-crusted perfectionism of Steely Dan’s Gaucho and updated it for listeners still coasting on chillwave’s good vibrations. It became Bejar’s most popular and acclaimed album yet.

Bejar reacts to success the same way he'd react to a noble flop

Poison Season makes it clear that Bejar reacts to meteoric success the same way he’d react to a noble flop: by moving forward. It’s not antagonistic or anti-commercial, but it’s deliberate, pompous, and unfocused. Bejar flips between muscle and fussiness once or twice a song. His writing is moodier and the hooks are less evident; he sounds like a weary traveller flipping through a passport rather than a caustic bon vivant. This is an album that takes languor to its logical extent, which is saying something given Bejar recorded many of the vocals that made up Kaputt while lying on his couch.

How does the past figure into a reactionary effort from an artist for whom stylistic shifts are the norm? It creeps in slowly over time, the album’s songs bending like a rotten plank of wood. Listen enough, and you can start to imagine a song like "The River" rendered several different ways depending on your chosen phase of Bejar’s career: heart-on-sleeve songsmith, MIDI technician, wine-drunk romantic, louche synth hound. (In the case of "Archer on the Beach," no imagination is required — a completely different version recorded pre-Kaputt is included on a 2010 EP.) It’s a phenomenon that renders Poison Season less an album and more an exercise in futility. Beach House looked back at their career and built on it; Bejar tried to outrun it, and it wriggled its way in anyway.