Dead Gowns

How does one cope with the pang of desire? Itʼs the tender, sometimes volatile question that confronts Genevieve Beaudoin on her debut full length as Dead Gowns. A deft lyricist with a sweeping range of poetic color and texture, Beaudoin paints her story in dark romantics, presenting a woman in the high summer of adulthood deciphering lifeʼs capacity to fulfill desires or let them go painfully unmet. These cravings – to be touched, to be known, to have just one more encounter with someone lost to time – are a lacuna Beaudoin prods at insistently throughout the albumʼs twelve songs. Though never named outright, Beaudoinʼs home in Maine – and its ragged, granite-strewn coastline – is an evocative character inhabiting the album, a force even more implacable than Beaudoinʼs emotions. Also present is the acute awareness of time passing. Pulled from an Eileen Miles poem, the albumʼs title, Itʼs Summer, I Love You, and Iʼm Surrounded by Snow, evokes a feeling of disorientation and the inevitability of change. External and internal forces charge Beaudoin, her inner world shifting much like the dizzying change of the seasons. “We get swept up in the blizzard, and then we are set down in the hot salty haze of August,” she says, remembering the Maine winters of her childhood. By the albumʼs end, Beaudoin holds her longing in the balance, no longer overcome but embodied. And if you listen carefully – these songs will pick you up and put you down again, transformed, raw, and satiated.

Remember Sports was a self-categorized “basement rock band” when they formed as a group of Kenyon College students in 2012. The band’s electrifying pop punk bonafides and the inimitable vocals of frontperson and primary songwriter Carmen Perry found them quick acclaim and a home at Father/Daughter. After four albums of expertly crafted pop punk, Remember Sports follows up last year’s epic Like a Stone with the first EP of their decade-long run. Recorded piecemeal in their respective homes, sometimes together, sometimes apart, Leap Day trades the live immediacy of their studio classics for something cozier, though no less rousing. The core trio of Carmen Perry, Catherine Dwyer, and Jack Washburn have always kept up active home recording practices for their solo projects–Carmen as Addie Pray, Catherine as Spring Onion, Jack under his own name–and here we find them gently folding sounds sprung from their bedrooms into their signature brand of basement rock. Absent a dedicated drummer for the first time in their recorded history, the band opts for simple drum machine accompaniment, lending the music a fresh weightlessness even as Carmen’s arresting vocals and sharp lyrics bring gravity in all their righteous anger, scathing self-reproach, and disarming tenderness. Musically, all the thrilling guitar riffs and grooving bass lines we’ve come to expect are here, but the gradual recording process offered the band more opportunity to explore and experiment, adding on subtle layers of instrumentation, distortion, and electronics, and with them a warm sense of depth. In all, Leap Day is a short and sweet, loose but confident affair; at once a reminder of Remember Sports’ absolute mastery of the pop rock anthem and a tantalizing sip from the well of ideas they have yet to plumb.