- There’s many things I find comforting about Beaches. Not least is the highly seductive promise of losing your ears in a great, enveloping sea of psych, shoegaze, guitar fuzz: the warm and welcoming doona of music; not to mention their sweet and brilliant retro-pop, I quite like that, too. The next thing on my list of comforting is, despite the quite unusual combination of sounds the girls in Beaches bring together, the resulting musical concoction just makes a lot of sense, especially on their second album She Beats.

To break that combination down a little further, you may notice that, behind the phaser-swirl psych, the whispered lyrics and roaring guitar wave shoegaze, there’s that slightly off-key jangle-pop, which after bands like The Clean were bundled off to the aged-care facility, has found its latter-day home much as Beaches themselves have, on Melbourne’s Chapter Music.

That trifecta of sounds gives them the scope to do all sorts of things and those things now include the gleaming and efficiently Deutsche sounds of kraut. Much has been made of the presence of kraut-rock legend Michael Rother on a couple of the tracks here, probably too much, but the engine-like repetition of Distance clicks into place amongst the gentle psych haze with surprising synchronicity: Peaking Lights eat your heart out.

The most intriguing upshot of Beaches hybrid approach - one that I keep coming back to - is the meeting of the often, nearly shapeless qualities of shoegaze and psych, which just want to swallow you up, whole, with the bright and brittle sounds of pop. It’s like their sound is a wave building up to crash on the shore and at its very tip is the pop, catching the brilliant sunlight. It’s a sweet spot that they hit to great effect on tracks like Dunes or single Send Them Away.

Every now and then the discordance, which is such a fundamental element to jangle-pop interferes with the otherwise uninterrupted, womb-like warmth of the shoegaze-psych. I don’t know if I’m being unreasonable, but it might be a sticking point when trying to bring these sounds together and one that threatens to mar my enjoyment of the otherwise cloudless horizon of summery pop presented by a track like Runaway.

With that minor reservation voiced I’m, fortunately, free to enjoy all of the other things that Beaches do. You should make some time to, they are many things to many people.

- Chris Cobcroft.