beat connection The Palace Garden (CD, £6.75)

Sparkling with the soft-focus mythology of eternal summers and teenage B movies, Beat Connection’s debut Surf Noir encapsulated the band’s aesthetic, a paean to youth that enthralled discerning critics and audiences alike. On August 6th Beat Connection – now a four piece with the addition of long term vocalist Tom Eddy and drummer Jarred Katz - release their first full-length The Palace Garden, a record that finds the band meditating on the idea of unattainable beauty, one that encases magical evenings, bountiful happiness, heavy regrets, and sky-clearing epiphanies. They’ve left all genre constraints behind allowing their music to broaden, rise and take them on new adventures, to new audiences. Think / Feel, an early introduction to the album which hit the blogs in March, saw The Fader dub the track “a song that’s easy to swallow but suddenly expansive the more you get into it” – a fitting description for this album as a whole. The first single The Palace Garden 4am – premiered this week on Pitchfork – features enough hooks to pack the dancefloor yet conjures up heat-induced imaginings, prescient given summer has finally arrived. Founder members Jordan Koplowitz and Reed Juenger met in 2008 as freshmen at the University of Washington, their fate sealed over a game of beer pong that turned into a discussion of mutual musical appreciation. As a youngster Koplowitz had picked up the guitar to play along with his favorite Metallica songs. Juenger had gone down a similar route with Nirvana, but found his friends cover bands too focused on bygone eras, prompting him to diversify into electronic music. In their new hometown of Seattle, the duo began crafting dorm-room beats on Garageband and venturing into DJing gigs, eventually working their way towards the sounds that would be become their first record, Surf Noir EP. They applied the knowledge they’d gleaned from the dance floor - “in that spirit of cutting loose, let’s have a good time and not worry too much: Saturday night always becomes Sunday morning.” says Jordan. Two of the songs, the singles “In The Water” and “Silver Screen,” featured Tom Eddy, the rest were instrumental but no less impressive; cool, sweeping waves of synths, electric guitar, drum machines, and samplers. In The Water and Silver Screen not only picked up adoring plaudits in the press but garnered Radio 1 support from Nick Grimshaw, Annie Mac, Huw Stephens, Rob Da Bank and Jen Long and love from 6Music, XFM and NME Radio. Having toured with the likes of Holy Ghost!, Toro Y Moi, Niki and The Dove and Real Estate, along with their own headlining dates both here and in the US in 2011, Beat Connection embark on 35-date headline tour in the US in June and will tour the UK in October of this year.