Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy.

For pristine pop, Beach House's self-titled 2006 debut was awfully raw: Legrand downplayed her classical piano and voice training in a humble negation of virtuosity. The organs sounded like something thick and coarse being pulled through a small, jagged opening; chord structures were simply suggestions; imperfections were kept intact. That balance of beauty and imprecision made inspired songs like "Saltwater", "Tokyo Witch", "Apple Orchard", and "Master of None" easy to fall in love with.

The duo's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on Devotion; they've simply cleaned up their act. These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris. "Gila" is a funeral on a sunny day; its shimmering organs are controlled, never bleeding chaotically as they did on the debut, and are complemented by frilly but steadfast guitar. "Turtle Island" reaffirms Beach House's preference for simple, skeletal percussion, but its dense melody is a marked advancement. The result of this pre-spring cleaning is that Devotion lacks some of the immediate highs of the first album-- you no longer get the sense of rooting for an embattled underdog-- but winds up consistently stronger.

Even though it's tidier and more streamlined, the music surrenders none of its autumnal charm, and there's still a sense of eavesdropping on a private, ongoing dialogue between Legrand and a ghost. Of course, we only get to hear her side of the story. As on the first album, which began with the words "Love you all the time, even though you're not mine," she favors second-person assertions that speak of self-effacement, dependence, and sinister dream-world conversations. "Your wish is my command," she intones on "Wedding Bell", becoming a genie in a puff of smoke. And on "Gila", she sings in a world-weary wheeze, "Man, you've got a lot of jokes to tell." But instead of the punch line, we get the sort of jarring shift that characterizes dreams: "So you throw your baby's banners down the well."

"Invite your sister into the garden," she drones on the wind-up waltz "You Came to Me", concurrently inviting us into the murky depths of her romantic consciousness. There's a sense of latent danger in the invitation, like a siren song luring us toward sharp clusters of rock. Portals into mysterious spaces pockmark Devotion; none of them promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand's devotion is a dungeon into which she tosses her own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return.