Album Review: Careers by Beverly

Not to be confused with Toronto grunge punks the Beverleys, Brooklyn's Beverly also prefer fuzzed-out guitars, just with a softer touch. The side-project of Frankie Rose, Beverly is actually the main project of Drew Citron, a former member of Rose's backing band.Careers is the debut album, and though she's not in charge, Rose's pop signature is a definite influence. Traces of Frankie's own recordings, as well as that she did with the Girls — Dum Dum and Vivian — seep into the frame, as Citron administers the same kind of sugary-sweet melodies.

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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’.

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Beverly began during Frankie Rose's 2013 tour when she and her band's keyboardist, Drew Citron, spent long hours talking about their shared musical tastes. Rose was keen to go back to playing drums, Citron was looking for an outlet for her songs, so it made perfect sense for them to join forces. After a quick listen to the duo's first album Careers, it's easy to hear some of the bands they must have bonded over, like the Breeders, the Shop Assistants, or any of the bands Rose was in previously (Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls).

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With so many contemporary groups employing a throwback approach to their songwriting and recording process, it can occasionally be more than a bit overwhelming and easier to simply dismiss the majority of these albums, lumping them into the “noise pop” or similarly-monikered subgenre with little second thought. Having made the rounds in a number of bands that would fall into this classification (Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, et. al.

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Now based in Los Angeles, Frankie Rose still claims veteran status in Brooklyn’s garage pop community. A former member of Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls, the songwriter later strayed in her solo career from the raspy, uptempo rock she’d helped popularize through the 2000s. Last year’s Herein Wild and 2012’s Interstellar pushed into a lightweight, lamé-draped shoegaze, as if Rose was trying to extract herself from the muscularity of guitar-playing to float out from the bodily restraints that come with rock.

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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.

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After reaching its peak in the last few years of the past decade, there’s been a noticeable lack of willing contenders vying to spearhead the next wave of blissed-out distortion. Most have either cleaned up their sound or disbanded after saturating their unwavering approach, but female duo Beverly are keeping that spark alive by resorting to a throwback sound that never seems to fray regardless of the execution. Sharing a likeminded vision for the C86 movement as well as early nineties British twee, the songwriting duo of Drew Citron and Frankie Rose decided to take a simpler method by writing a batch of sweetly-attuned pop songs that demonstrates their years of experience within their tight-knit musical circle.

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The early '90s were a golden age for female-fronted guitar pop bands. Groups like The Blake Babies, that dog, Velocity Girl, or The Darling Buds weren't doing anything as advanced or far-out as what artists like P.J. Harvey, The Breeders, or Liz Phair were up to roundabout the same time, but they filled a need for sunny alternative pop centered on warm, feminine vocals.

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Beverly is the project of Drew Citron (of art-pop group Avan Lava) and Frankie Rose (formerly of the ever-morphing Dum Dum Girls), so it’s no surprise that their debut LP lands somewhere between Avan Lava’s ecstatic pop jams and Dum Dum Girls’ breezy, well-brushed garage rock. But Citron wrote every track on Careers, so it’s something of an exercise in her own stylistic strengths and personal nuances, rather than just another offshoot of perpetually offshooting bands.At 10-tracks long, the album is a brief one, but that means less room for error and more time to focus on Careers‘ best tracks. Madora kicks things off, but its woozy, filtered, future doo-wop is slightly misleading.

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