Spectreview: Long Beard – Means To Me

-PURPLE-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

The formative years of our lives are defined by structure. But after high school, the script is muddied: connections are harder to maintain; home doesn’t feel like it used to; the future isn’t as certain as it once was. What does one do from there?

This fundamental anxiety lies at the heart of Means to Me, Leslie Bear’s sophomore outing as Long Beard. Her languid, hazy portrait of suburban ennui explores growing older and her sense of alienation with New Brunswick, New Jersey, the place in which she was raised. However, despite the undercurrent of uncertainty that runs throughout the course of the record, Means to Me pulls from a warm sonic color palette and creates something wistful, dreamy, and ultimately hopeful. 

Means to Me is at its best when Bear finds striking clarity in her lyrics. “Told you about my first kiss / In the rain out of CVS / Since then I’ve found / What I’m worth to myself,” she sings on “Sweetheart”. By deploying icons of suburbia like this, she grounds her stories in a relatable landscape, which makes her astute observations, laments, and moments of self-discovery more poignant.

Bear explores her heartbreak in ways that refreshingly eschew cliché. On the titular “Means to Me”, she recounts a time when a former significant other told her that they were with someone new. Bear vividly describes being in the back seat of a car when hearing this and her heartbreaking response: “Said she must be a nice girl, baby / While I’m just waiting for somebody else / To hold me.”

On her 2015 debut album, Sleepwalker, Bear’s sound was based in dream-pop and took some risks, to mixed results. Here, she has her feet firmly set in a melancholy, golden-hour tinted sound. While she sounds more sure of herself, at times Means to Me can wash over the listener, as the sonics from track to track retain many of the same qualities.

“The Last”, the final track on the album, is not one of those times. Over a lonesome guitar, Bear sings from both perspectives of a goodbye. As she drives away, finishing her vocal performance, the percussion kicks in and an arresting guitar solo concludes the album. Much like the bright contrast between the red apple the white picket fence on the artwork, Means to Me excels when Bear’s personal observations on suburbia are at their most striking and affecting.

Recommended for a trip back home in autumn.