Pure Bathing Culture :: "Dream The Dare"

Chasing and expanding the Beach House legacy of dreamy and detached pop songs possessing an ineffable human pathos, Pure Bathing Culture exceed these references and footnotes on "Dream The Dare", the band's most expansive and fully-rendered work to date. Mixing sweeping guitars and the liquidity of a dripping drum sample, the vocals rise beneath the listener on lyrics like, "Give me forward motion." The melody is downright baroque: decent, delicate and measured. As the chorus peppers back and forth between pitches - the kind of tonal modulation that makes pop music so immediate and so pleasing - vocalist Sarah Versprille suggests a transcendence of limitations, a sort of transmutation of the "withered words" and caged chests that we hide in and behind. Vaguely existential in the grand humanist tradition of "feeling everything all the time", Pure Bathing Culture builds a mountain of dreamy pop on "Dream The Dare", one of the best hooks and best songs of the year.