Beverly

Indie-pop duo Beverly is a project comprised of singer/drummer Frankie Rose and Drew Citron of New York pop stylists Avan Lava, the latter of which wrote the songs that make up the project's debut LP, Careers (Rose pitched in on drums and vocal harmonies). So Beverly is less a true duo than a vehicle for Citron’s compositional voice—Rose has since returned her focus to her solo career, and Citron will flesh out Beverly tracks live with the help of an all new band—and the material reflects Citron's smart choices with respect to genre and style.
There aren’t a ton of moving parts contained within these songs, so their success is dependent on the strength of Citron’s vocals and guitar parts. She has an incredible ear for tone and texture, which marks most of the best tracks on Careers: the crushing, blurry chords of “Honey Do”, the fuzz-flecked lead that kicks off “All the Things”, the serrated stabs of the hard-charging “Ambular.” The contrast between the oft-aggressive, mildly menacing sound of Citron’s guitar and her sweet, spacey harmonies with Rose is a compelling source of tension, especially on road warrior anthems like “Planet Birthday” and “Ambular,” songs that sound like wholesome, slightly bored teens tangling with their worst slash-and-burn impulses and pouring them into muddy four-track recorders.
Citron’s invocation of the realities of teenage life — surface sweetness, hidden lust, churning and boiling internal sensations — is largely a conscious decision; as told to Rolling Stone, the concept for Beverly was developed around “this trashy character, a teenaged brat who hangs out in a 7-Eleven parking lot, smokes cigarettes, and doesn’t get along with the other kids.” It's a loose concept, sure, but its presence can be felt on Careers, especially when Citron careens from venomous, angry punk to jangly, mild lust to blown-out emotional hangovers in the span of three songs.
The thematic expression is musical, too: with a few notable exceptions, like sleepy shoegaze ballad "Yale's Life", Citron chooses to focus on her sound's ability to create feeling instead of leaning on her words. (Perhaps she subscribes to a slightly altered version of the old music journalism chestnut: writing about teendom is like dancing about architecture.) So lyrically, there's potential for growth, as her takes on youth can only stand to be fleshed out by greater lyrical focus. For now, Careers stands up as a testament to the power of serendipity and a decent first effort from a blooming young songwriter. - Pitchfork

A garage-pop treat with the perfect ratio of fuzzed distortion and melodic sugar. - Rolling Stone

Beverly’s effortless indie rock debut is the result of a casual collaboration between honey-voiced guitarist Drew Citron and her occasional employer, former Dum Dum and Vivian Girl Frankie Rose. Citron’s own musical CV includes The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, while another career nodded to in the album’s title is Kim Deal’s. ‘Madora’ is the direct offspring of Pixies’ ‘Velouria’, and the feedback riddled ‘Planet Birthday’ and breathless garage of ‘Out On A Ride’ pass muster as out-takes from The Breeders’ ‘Last Splash’. Although the pure pop harmonies of ‘All The Things’ and ‘You Can’t Get It Right’ equal anything on Rose’s own albums, she’s already moved on, leaving Citron to take charge of this alluring project. - NME

I won’t lie: This was a rough week. Some weeks are rough because there are so many great albums that, when I pick one, I’m doing a disservice to all the others. And then some weeks are rough because there’s just nothing going on. This is one of those weeks. We haven’t seen a release date this barren since January, and I can’t even imagine why that would be the case. When it’s like that, you can go a couple of directions. You can venture far afield from your usual chosen genres and find something that works amazingly on its own terms. This wasn’t the week for that; Trey Songz’ Trigga and Robin Thicke’s Paula were not exactly waiting around to kick my ass. So instead, we’re going the other direction: Finding an album that fits squarely into the sort of thing Stereogum usually covers, but which would’ve probably flown under the radar during a more packed week. And that’s why this week’s Album Of The Week is Careers, the pleasant but slight debut from the Brooklyn duo Beverly.

After that opening paragraph, everything I have to say about Careers is going to look like faint praise, but “pleasant but slight” is no slight. Careers is not an ambitious album; its 10 tracks breeze by in less than half an hour, and it’s not even a Ramones sort of thing where they’re just anxious to get to the next one. The pace is calm, expansive, unhurried. The guitars sound like sunbeams shining in through a dusty room. The harmonies flutter like candy wrappers in a pleasant spring breeze. It’s just about impossible to keep a bad mood going while the album plays. But there’s no holy-fuck moment, no section of a song where the duo leaves its body behind and soars skyward. If you’re looking for an album that will consume your soul this summer, that will give grand meaning to even the most quotidian tasks, that will remain tangled up forever with your memories of the summer of 2014, then you’re a week late, and you should really catch up with the How To Dress Well joint. But if you’re looking for a nice soundtrack to the next time you’re cleaning your apartment, you’ve come to the right place.

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Frankie Rose is one half of Beverly, and since she went solo, she’s made three albums that are just as pleasant as this one, albums that play around with new wave and postpunk and late-’80s indie-pop. There are hints of those sounds in Careers, too, but Rose isn’t the mastermind this time. Instead, she’s in a supporting role, and Drew Citron, who used to play in Rose’s backing band and in the New York electro-pop group Ava Luna, is the driving force. Citron seems to be most comfortable with simple bash-it-out fuzz-pop, a genre that’s got nostalgia built into its bones. And so Beverly reminds me of bands I grew up with, bands like Tuscadero and the Rondelles, who fused garage rock with Buzzcocks-born pop-punk and early-’90s twee-core. I have fond memories of those bands, and those bands were probably built from fond memories themselves. Rose used to play drums in the Vivian Girls, who worked a sped-up (and, to my mind, not-as-good) take on that same sound. And so Beverly, like every other band in their whole genetic tree, probably have a ton of the Ronnettes and the Kingsmen in their musical DNA, and they’ve picked up all sorts of indie fuzz down the line. Rose and Citron spend most of the album singing in close, reverby harmony, and their voices work better together than either would alone. It’s small, quiet, conspiratorial music, and in the right light, it’s just gorgeous.

But fuzzy garage-pop isn’t the only thing Beverly do, and there’s a nice sense of variation within the 10 tracks of Careers. “Ambular” is a two-minute kraut-punk workout with no vocals; it reminds me of the moment, around 1978, when the first UK punk bands started listening to Can and ended up making weird fusions like Magazine. “Hong Kong Hotel” is a basement-synthpop prom theme. “Black And Grey,” the album’s last song, uses early Stereolab as its starting point, and it’s full of empty space. Opener “Madora” has such a bald Pixies bite in its chorus that I can’t help but admire it. Throughout, they try different things, tinkering with ideas of melody and genre. Careers is a figuring-things-out album, not a fully-formed debut. But during a slow week, an exceedingly pleasant figuring-things-out album is more than enough.

Careers is out now on Kanine. Stream it below. - Stereogum

Psyched to premiere the glowing, dream-like Jacob Graham-directed visuals for Beverly‘s achingly beautiful new single “Victoria“, which was co-written by Kip Berman of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Beverly’s Drew Citron tells us over email:
The video was inspired by our friend Jacob Graham’s short movies that he creates with his brother. I watched one and immediately called him up and asked if he wanted to direct a music video. Jacob is the synth player and a songwriter in The Drums. He is the kind of person who puts real tea lights on his christmas tree, and uses electrical tape to make an Ikea cupboard look like 16th century stained glass. All the visual effects for the “Victoria” video were done by hand. A music video doesn’t have to have a narrative structure or gimmick – it can just be shapes, colors and moods. We had a lot of fun making this with him in his bedroom, he’s a magician." - Gorilla vs. Bear