Review: Beach House at Union Transfer

'It's nice to be someplace we call home," Beach House's Victoria Legrand told the crowd at Union Transfer on Friday night. Born in Paris, raised in Maryland and the Philadelphia suburbs, and eventually meeting musical partner Alex Scally in Baltimore, Legrand can lay claim to being from many different places, which isn't quite the same as hailing from nowhere at all.

Beach House's songs are similarly rootless, grounded by the buzz of vintage synthesizers but buoyed by Scally's shimmering guitar and Legrand's ethereal voice. At Union Transfer, Legrand's vocals were often swathed in echo and filtered through a curtain of undulating harmony, syllables detached and left to swim in a sea of soft, warm fog. On "Space Song," from last year's album, Depression Cherry, Legrand sang "Fall back into place" as if it were five words instead of four, each inhabiting a miniature planet of its own.

You might not gather it from Beach House's relaxed stage show, but it is in the middle of a period of unprecedented productivity. Depression Cherry's August release, accompanied by the usual flurry of carefully arranged feature articles, was followed in October by the surprise release of another album, Thank Your Lucky Stars; the group put out as much music in two months as it had in the previous five years.

Friday's sold-out Union Transfer show was followed by another on Saturday night, and a third show was scheduled for Sunday night, the last an intimate installation in a location disclosed only to the fans who snapped up the small handful of available tickets.

As a self-identified "bedroom band," Beach House has been careful about not growing too big or too fast: It famously rebuffed multiple offers to use "Take Care" in a Volkswagen commercial, then sued when the company used a sound-alike song instead. The installation shows, which Legrand and Scally are performing as a duo, are, according to their website, an attempt to capture the "pure, embryonic state of mind" from which their songs spring, before they expand in the studio and are further blown up to suit a four-piece live band.

At the most powerful moments of the Union Transfer show, such as when the carousel swirl of "PPP" built to its ecstatic heights, Legrand, Scally and their compatriots bridged the gap between bedroom and concert hall, making audience members feel as if they, too, were safe at home.