Chanel Beads
Your Day Will Come
JAGJAGUWAR
Chanel Beads makes music that feels a bit broken. The NYC-based project spearheaded by Shane Lavers combines chunky drum samples, spectral vocals that sometimes ambiguously overlap with those of partner Maya McGrory, and sampled and recorded strings that have the aura of a ship lost at sea. The reverby guitars are slanted like old wooden steps that function, but feel on the verge of collapse; the swelling violins seem like they know something we don’t; the synth and bass are part Law & Order theme and part Twin Peaks soundtrack—a sweet spot between unsettling and endearing. Everything is a bit off-center, but still sounds complete.
Your Day Will Come exceeds at the two descriptors Lavers had in mind when crafting Chanel Beads’ debut: “beautiful, shitty.” The record is skillfully fractured, a gorgeous half-forgotten memory. Its sublime beauty lies in its fixation with reality being transient. Our understanding of life, time, and death are intertwined with the people around us. Throughout Your Day Will Come, Chanel Beads negotiates peace with the intangibility of complex emotions—the brain unable to pin down memory, dreams, and new thoughts. “It’s funny, numbers have significance now / Yeah, your birthday that kinda hurts me now,” Lavers reflects on “Urn” over pin-pricking acoustic guitar. “Like the day you died / The day you drank all that honey,” he continues. His tone feels confrontational toward the song’s deceased subject, even though he’s singing in the past tense. Time is collapsing in on itself, seemingly both here and gone.
Lavers’ music is an ambient, post-punk, dissociative dream-pop conundrum. There are pockets of orchestral new wave clarity and then moments where that completely dissolves into patchworked ethereal sound. In a few interviews leading up to the release, Lavers expressed his draw toward the uncomfortable. “A lot of the inspiration for my music comes from those fleeting moments when you have a surge of confidence, a eureka moment, and you can tie your worldview into a neat little bow,” he explained. “Then, a second later, you’re like, ‘Oh no! That doesn’t make any sense.’ It all falls apart immediately.”
As heavy as all this sounds, Your Day Will Come never feels overbearing. On “Police Scanner,” Lavers sings over a holographic construction hammer beat and scruffy acoustic guitar: “Soul to bare / Changes come / Something strange, yeah something new.” The grief, the unknown, life’s evanescence can transform into something vulnerable and completely freeing.
