Chanel Beads

What I like about Chanel Beads’ music is the ambiguity. The album titles of both their albums so far, Your Day Will Come, can either be a hopeful mantra or a threat depending on the tone. Why not both, the music within them asks. The reedy vocals of Shane Lavers are an androgynous, high-pitched quaver that you could mistake for the voice of covocalist Maya McGrory, and Lavers is able to change the meaning of the lyrics by either manipulating the words themselves (“Save me from the slaughter” —> “Show me to the slaughter”), or changing his tone on subsequent repetitions.

And, of course, ambiguity in genre, par for the course in the post-everything era. Chanel Beads’ music is reminiscent of the pop/rock-cum-singer/songwriter sensibility of Alex G by way of hypnagogic pop, a genre that had a sudden comeback just a month before the release of Chanel Beads’ debut. Which is a fancy way of saying that Chanel Beads’ music can be indie rock and dream pop but also neither since they don’t rock enough to file in the former, and the overtones of darkness distinguishes them too much from the latter.

Their sophomore album arrived to considerably less fanfare than did their debut two years ago. I presume people got the wrong impression of what the band wanted to be from their 2022 breakthrough single “Ef,” waited patiently for two years for a debut album, and only got one more song in the same vein in “Police Scanner,” and moved on. Which is a shame, because there’s a massive improvement in songwriting on their second album compared to their first, which frankly smacked of a rushed-out quality to capitalize on the success of both the “Ef” and “Police Scanner” singles.

To wit, Chanel Beads’ first album felt like a series of vignettes whose whole was definitely not greater than the sum of its parts, whose short song lengths didn’t let listeners linger on the beauty of the falsettoed hook of “Idea June” (sung by McGrory) or what it might mean that the drum track and vocal sample of “Embarrassed Dog” felt like a trip-hop beat or even bask too long in the pop pleasure of “Police Scanner” which its prominent 80s’ drum beat. That a third of the album’s run-time is taken up by instrumentals—the playful string line from Zachary Schwartz on the title track, the 5-minute long “Coffee Culture” that was built out of samples from the London Philharmonic Orchestra—made the already short album feel even slighter.

In an interview with Loud and Quiet, Lavers talked about how acoustic guitar-led songs were not his original intention as a musician. After moving from Minnesota to Seattle, Lavers first began making “a gimmicky sound collage thing, which is my favorite music,” before he realized he couldn’t demonstrate his music on the fly as easily as singer/songwriters, prompting him to begin sketching out lyrics and chords. Thus, unlike a lot of singer/songwriters that went backwards to lo-fi sampling for textures, Lavers went the other way around, crafting hazy dreamworlds, and then filling in the scaffolding with acoustic guitars and vocals.

Lavers namedropped Steve Reich and Animal Collective in that same interview as inspirations when he started making the transition to becoming a singer/songwriter. You can hear Reich in Lavers’ repetitive method of songwriting much more on the second album, where he develops on a melodic idea or fragment for an entire song rather than rely on traditional verse-chorus song structures, and the weirdness is reminiscent of early Animal Collective, although his folk is not as freaky. (Put it this way: I can’t imagine most any artist making Sung Tongs, but Chanel Beads would get much closer than most.)

The album hits its stride early on. A recording of “I should go to tell for what I fucking said to you” opens “Song for the Messenger” as if it were a Moin song, and that song has a hook has gone a lot further for me than either “Ef” or “Police Scanner,” and not just because Lavers keeps changing the words. “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare” follows, whose chorus, “I thought I saw you smiling / In all my memories,” articulates in words the interrogative nature of the best hypnagogic pop, a genre built on nostalgia for the previous generation’s music. And the Alex G namedrops by critics makes total sense as the song layers in an organ-like drone that sounds to me like the exact same chords as the one that Alex G used for the masterful “June Guitar” last year.

The textures are also far more interesting than last time too. “Tyler Richard” opens with a keyboard line lifted straight out of new age, repurposed for one of the most violent tracks on the album (“In a dream, I wrote a song for you” —> “In a dream, I beat the shit out of you”). Meanwhile, a harpsichord leads “Spirit Showing,” and the production bends acoustic guitars until they like a koto on “Drunk Stupid in the Structure.” Some of the band’s friends also contribute with instruments that are outside their sphere like 6-string bass guitar on “Drums Only” and pedal steel guitar on “Song for the Messenger.”

It’s a shame that Lavers’ method of singing is so indebted to Animal Collective’s “For Reverend Green”’s switching-to-screeching that it makes a lot of his vocals melodies here blur together, which makes the new album flag in its second half after “Outside of Your Life,” which starts with a minute of pure drone before becoming the album’s most drum-forward track. But if it was hype that led you to check out their debut, and a lack thereof that made you decide not to check this one out, then hopefully some of these words convinced you otherwise.