Peter Lacey

If Howard Jones, after his excellent first two albums, had packed away all but one of his synthesizers in the attic, sat down at the baby grand piano, and composed his own version of Pet Sounds, it might very well have sounded something like Peter Lacey's debut full length, an exquisitely nuanced and delicate pop album filled with the cathedral-like echoes of the litany of chamber pop masterminds that emerged in the 1960s. Mid-period Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach are admitted influences on Lacey, but his music is not at all a mimicry of them. He instead uses them as reference points to push his songwriting past the realm of simple pop/rock and toward the level of pop art. With Beam!, Laceydraws on Brian Wilson's complex melodic and harmonic brilliance and elaborate arrangements, but he also seems touched by the same cherubic life outlook and a romantic yearning. Lacey recorded the album almost entirely by himself on his own home portastudio, and so the music was limited by its sonic parameters, as well as its lyrical ones, with references to the Sussex, England landscape that he calls home continually cropping up and immediately disavowing the listener of the notion that some mythic, sunny paradise is at the heart of the music. Lacey uncoils lovely melody after lovely melody, each just as lush and panoramic and as full of interesting quirks as those of Wilson and Bacharach. But it is the album's centerpiece, "Dear Life," that acts as the album's catalyst from merely gorgeous pop to the truly sublime. Celestial harmonies open the song, and like Wilson, whose single motivation and aim was to sing "a children's song," its opening line has a similar ethereal reach ("Sing an angel's song"). From that impetus, the final half of the album grasps out for the sacred, for that one cosmic essence that will transcend time. Beam!, in its soft-hearted way, is that thing. It is tethered to no particular time or era, only to a place and a mood. It is a romantic, rich, and unequivocally accomplished album so full of crafted imagination that it is capable of putting a smile on anyone's face. ~ Stanton Swihart, All Music Guide