On the evidence of a first day or so of listening, one of a very few (fingers of one hand) dream-pop records that even get close to the magic of the Cocteau Twins, Bloom starts promisingly with the building, enveloping, arpeggio-cascading "Myth", and gets even better as it goes on. Beach House have largely passed me by before - I've heard a couple of their songs on mix cds and liked them well enough, and thought their festival set a while back was pretty good - but Bloom is fantastic. It's true that I'm wired to like this kind of thing - sweeping, spacey, swathey dream-pop, full of swoons and upwards surges - but the flipside is that I listen to a lot of it, and mark hard, and this is the real thing, at once ethereal and vivid, distinctly of a piece but filled with textural variation and colour, and without a weak song (the opening pair of "Myth"-"Wild", second act "New Year"-"Wishes" and show-stopping closer (pre-hidden track) "Irene" are particularly great).
