Leslie Bear’s second album as Long Beard is a narrative of home, albeit a nebulous one; across the 10 songs on Means to Me, the New Jersey dream-pop musician never refers to her town by name. She doesn’t illustrate tree-lined streets, or her favorite hangout spots, or the house she grew up in. The only landmark she cites is the local CVS, outside which she had her first kiss. On paper, this could be a record about any ordinary American suburb.
The four years since Bear’s debut, Sleepwalker, have taken her all around the country: She quit her corporate job and toured with Japanese Breakfast before returning to her native New Brunswick to earn a computer science degree at Rutgers. She’s not referencing home as a place, but rather home as a feeling—or a lack thereof. Bear isn’t as concerned about winding up in New Brunswick again as she is about the disorientation caused by her time away. She’s grappling with the bittersweet nostalgia and alienation of migrating in reverse. Although the geographical setting of Means to Me is ambiguous, the closeness Bear conveys makes it entirely personal.
Like her contemporaries Hatchie and Jay Som, Long Beard builds her music from wistful vocals and jangly guitars. On Sleepwalker, the dreamy effects often reverberated to the point of oblivion. Means to Me finds more stable footing: Bear’s enunciations are clearer, her instrumentation more active and forward-moving. Highlights like “Getting By,” “Sweetheart,” and the title track are tethered by steady percussion while still maintaining her celestial, atmospheric aura. The lucidity makes Bear’s anecdotes easier to grasp: Her high school sweetheart is now married, and as she resettles in this anonymous town, she finds her surroundings plagued with reminders of a love that dissipated a decade ago.
Means to Me can feel one-dimensional, so preoccupied with the opinions of others—people whom Bear’s narrator hasn’t seen in years—that there’s hardly any room for catharsis or self-reflection. “Aren’t you better off without me rooted in your town?” she echoes on “Snow Globe.” “Still hoping you would talk to me/Through the colder months of fall/But you never called,” goes opener “Countless.” “I don’t know why I come/Just to see if you’ll have me,” she wonders in “Monarch.” Depleted, she likens her heart to an “empty bottle.” She writes about feelings of uncertainty and rejection but rarely goes deeper, offering little insight to her own growth and never explaining why she returned home in the first place.
But in its layered textures and unguarded lyricism, Means to Me testifies to Bear’s upward trajectory as a writer and musician. Though she doesn’t give much clarity to her intentions, her emotions are transparent. She’s endured the kind of upheaval that could easily distort someone’s identity, yet hers is surprisingly apparent as she recalls these lovelorn memories. Patiently channeling pain and turmoil into airy, gorgeous dream-pop, she makes a nameless location—somewhere that might be almost anywhere—feel intimate and particular.
Buy: Rough Trade
