Memorial Orthodoxy

Through distorted pop sensibilities, Chanel Beads’ debut album Your Day Will Come coheres around an interplay of unspecific divination and the unbearable task of rescuing memory from time and its diluting properties. The album’s title has a dual function as ominous warning and buoyant yearning; the contemporary moment proceeds with an eerie torque that makes it evanescent or hysterically impersonal. Creation sometimes dispenses with this uncertainty in favor of the timid safety of rehabilitating what’s already occurred. On the album’s fourth track “Embarrassed Dog,” frontman Shane Lavers wails: “reckoning the past moves closer every day.

This reckoning operates as the album’s motor, and across nine tracks the listener is given a predictable runway to traipse around the surreptitious void that gives shape to our unshareable present. Heartache, loss, and dashed hopes are traversed through a customary formula of hazy guitars, digitally-manipulated strings, and bass with a melancholic drip. Thematically and sonically, tracks like “Police Scanner” and “Urn” feel like stock images of an anguished mind. Catchy melodies aside, if cliché is being put to work as an element of conceptual rigor, it falls flat and remains a travesty of something earnest or more inventive.

Stated plainly, I feel Your Day Will Come too neatly follows the lo-fi pathway from Altered Zones-era experimental groups, to early 2010s acts like La Big Vic and Big Troubles, to Hype Williams, to early Alex G, and so on. Chanel Beads’ debut effort is overall a bit prosaic and unchallenging, and I hope Lavers’ sophomore attempt and future output are a bit more confident in their ability to reckon with the past.