I am a Beach House devotee. Every time I walk through a park I think, funnily enough, of 'Walk in the Park', I want 'Take Care' to be played at all my major life events, and 'Real Love' has been the soundtrack to so many long journeys that in my mind the song is inextricably linked with First Great Western. As such, a new release is a high stakes game, and I am far from the detached reviewer this section perhaps requires. Beach House have released two new albums in as many months and, in short, I am a bewildered and emotional wreck.

Whilst Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally insist that Thank Your Lucky Stars is not a 'surprise' album, the timing of the release, exactly seven weeks after their last album Depression Cherry (yes, I counted) means its existence and relationship with the rest of the band's work is under much closer scrutiny than the albums Beach House steadily release at a reassuring rate of 2 or 3 years. This is not the only way the band departs from their trademark way of doing things, and the result is disconcerting.

Essentially, Thank Your Lucky Stars is the first album on which Beach House sound like anything or anyone else. The songs were recorded at the same time as Depression Cherry and on paper seem very similar; influences of shoegaze, minimal drums and a return to the quieter, murkier sound of their earlier releases, Devotion and their self-titled debut. But while Depression Cherry makes good on Beach House's mission of escaping the grip of commercial pressures which have pushed their music away from its spiritual home, Thank Your Lucky Stars seems not so much vintage Beach House as a pastiche of their influences. The sheer otherworldly and complicated beauty of Depression Cherry is exchanged for an altogether less stratospheric sound.

Comparing the two lead singles is a case in point. The shoegaze sound on 'Sparks' (Depression Cherry) sounds like extra-terrestrials descending to colonise your home planet, although they're so lovely and calm that you don't really mind. The shoegaze on 'Majorette' (TYLS), on the other hand, brings everything back down to earth. It doesn't sound like Beach House drawing on early 90s influences , it sounds like My Bloody Valentine, or even Suede or Radiohead circa Pablo Honey doing a Beach House impersonation.

Not only the sound but the lyrical content of Depression Cherry seems more familiar. The Beach House I know and love talk about waiting silently around Turtle Island's murky ponds, of black and white horses arching their backs as they run across uncertain landscapes. On Thank Your Lucky Stars, instead we get insipid lines like 'she's a rollercoaster, she's a fire in the night'. The 'sons and daughters/ bending at the altar' of 'Elegy to the Void', the album's best track, are mildly evocative, but this is more classic stock gothic imagery that wouldn't be amiss in the most cynical Lana del Rey song. Perhaps Beach House are becoming more confident in expressing emotions directly. But this frankness doesn't come with impact. There is power in honesty and directness, sure, but the band's emotional resonance, the ache they concoct with soaring harmonies and lilting, wailing guitars, has up to this point rested more on evocation and allusion, vague references to feelings that can't be described. Emotions, you feel, had never actually been described before until this solemn and wistful Baltimore duo articulated them with a force that makes your skin prickle and all the muscles around your heart contract. Unless that's just me on the 15.10 to London Paddington.

Trying to second-guess what the band are up to is difficult. And to be honest, in all likelihood they are not 'up to' anything. In interviews, what always comes across is Beach House's sometimes agonised pursuit of honesty and authenticity; they're not ones to play games. And authenticity often means not relying too much on how you're going to come across to other people. The band's release of this album may be an unusual move, but Beach House simply made the songs and wanted to release them. Perhaps the sound of Thank Your Lucky Stars is different, uncertain and unpolished, but perhaps the band's sound is multifaceted and undergoing change. Real growth and development, in music and in people, is rarely pretty.