by Erin Bensinger (@_babybluet)
On her first record in four years as Long Beard, Leslie Bear’s glittering dream pop is cleaner and brighter than ever. Means to Me, out on Double Double Whammy, is a meditation on the notions of place and time. It was written after a series of upheavals in Bear’s life: uprooting to tour the country with Japanese Breakfast, then moving back to her hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey to complete her degree, only to find all of her friends and past loves long gone.
The standout track is “Sweetheart,” a reflection on Beard’s high school sweetheart from ten years down the road. It begins with a wistful progression of clean, strummed guitars and the lyrical gut punch, “High school sweetheart / don’t wait too long to marry / well, you’re married now.” Lyrically, the rest of the track is a post-mortem examination of the relationship in question and an admission that it lingers still in Bear’s mind, especially since her return to the small town they shared together. The song builds with the addition of crystalline, synth-like guitar riffs, looping and iterating endlessly over the sprawling verses and chorus. Bear occasionally adds in tiny accents, like a percussive bell or a reverberating vocal harmony. It’s a track that evolves as you listen, shifting shape to draw you through different shades of nostalgia until its final minute of instrumentals, which pulls together each of the song’s movements into a unified, richly-layered sound.
The title track, “Means to Me,” is more spare and abstract in comparison. Its lyrics center around the idea of “home” and what such a thing could possibly mean, and its sound is slower and more ethereal than earlier tracks on the album. Planting one foot firmly in the realm of shoegaze, the bridge finds Bear whispering back and forth to herself: “gold (summer’s) / light (over) / feels (hope you’re) / right / home (too long) / sweet (I don’t) / home (know) / what it means to me.” Toward the end, the track picks up speed and enters jangle-pop territory, experimenting with sharper textures and bolder melodies without losing that airy, dreamlike quality.
The record evokes the disorienting feeling of waking up in your childhood bedroom, seeing your high school detritus piled in the corners of closets and tacked to bulletin boards, and thinking, my god, when did I get so old? Propelling you to that place is Bear’s knack for layering gauzy, delicate textures ever-so-carefully into perfectly-wrapped dream pop confections, aided by co-producer Craig Hendrix of Japanese Breakfast. Each track is at once deeply complex and so very simple: shimmering guitars, echoing vocals, and a thin drum beat are the main elements of each track, and yet they take on a kaleidoscope’s worth of different shapes.