Your Day Will Come

At once a hazy relic and a digital snapshot of the humanexperience, Your Day Will Come is the debut album fromChanel Beads, arriving via Jagjaguwar. The remarkableproject announces the arrival of New York-based musicianShane Lavers as a new force in experimental music, capturingthe many contradictions of modern existence and the strangeinfiniteness of the digital world. The songs feel like a memory inwhich you can’t distinguish between what actually happened orwhat was a false reproduction in your mind—although theburning emotion remains intact.

Lavers pushed himself to strip his own sense of ego fromYour Day Will Come. Throughout, Lavers weaves incontributions from his live bandmates, singer-songwriter MayaMcGrory (Colle) and experimental instrumentalist ZacharyPaul, who offer their own layers of feeling. As McGrory offers amore full-bodied tone and Lavers often sings with his higher-pitched head voice, the two collaborators meet in the middle;it’s an intermingling of identities or a subconscious pining forandrogyny. In this slippery space, different perspectives mergetogether, and there’s a sense of empathy and humility thatarises from the blending of these voices. These days, ChanelBeads live shows see all three performers weaving together inabsolute catharsis.

This catharsis is pushed to its peak on “Idea June,” which seesMcGrory taking over lead vocals to project Lavers’ lyrics. AsMcGrory sings, “The waves wash onto my shore,” in a voicethat’s both earnest and digitally processed, it’s as though she'sspeaking as a separate embodiment of Lavers. In under twominutes, the track of clunky acoustic guitar and gutting stringslands somewhere between detachment and kinship. Similar tothe off-kilter structure of “Police Scanner,” these songs arestrangely affecting in their unfinished and liminal forms. Lavers,who is drawn to poor MP3 rips and transitional moments in DJmixes, knows that these inexact musical artifacts evoke humanimperfection.

The title of Your Day Will Come could be read as a promiseof the arrival of good karma, or it could be a reminder of one’smortality, said out of spite. Yet as Lavers unpacks the hauntingfeelings of the past that he must release in order to move intohis future, he reminds us that grief and hope might be closerthan they seem to the naked eye.