New York’s Shane Lavers, going by the title Chanel Beads since 2010, is back with a new track, “The Coward Forgets His Nightmare,” shared on Jagjaguwar. The track flutters like a lucid dream, delicate, gorgeous, and only the slightest bit unstable, as if trying to catch hold of a feeling that’s too busy dissolving itself in real time.
This song feels weightless and weighted with meaning. Lavers’ reflective lyrics sketch a frustrated truce between fear and forgetting, as if wrestling with the ghosts of modern life. The result is a soundscape that distorts time, a place of melancholy and momentum. Zachary Paul’s violin slices through the haze as a linchpin to reality, and Maya McGrory’s diaphanous vocals evaporate in and out of the mix, mimicking memory’s phantom life.
“The Coward Forgets His Nightmare” has this tension between the raw and the refined. Its post-punk scrappiness grapple-dances with pop’s tender sentimentality, all wrapped in a spectral electronic shimmer that plays like digital memories made flesh. Lavers has always been a master of paradox, and here he defines the disjuncture of life in an infinite world. Chanel Beads has made something intimate and mysterious, a track that challenges you to be sincere at a time of infinite scrolls and fleeting memories.
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