Brian Dunne: Clams Tour with Dead Gowns

Brian Dunne

If you're a romantic, an artist, or an otherwise sentient being looking for a reason to believe, consider Clams Casino your wake up call. The fourth solo album from New York songwriter Brian Dunne is a burst of energy, a colossal leap forward, and a prolonged moment of direct eye-contact from one of this generation’s sharpest observers of young American life. Self-produced at Dunne’s home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Clams Casino was inspired by the classic songwriting form of working-class blues and placed in an unmistakably modern context. “Is it so bad to want a good life?” he asks in the opening title track, and these bracing, hook-filled songs navigate our ongoing negotiations through disappointment and rejection, loss and isolation, and ultimately, hard-earned self-determination.

Even in conversation, it’s a classic Brian Dunne observation: funny, sad, compassionate, twisting idiomatic language until you’re left questioning received wisdom and, hopefully, trusting your instincts a little more. In this way, Clams Casino is the rare rock record that manages to inspire without ignoring the darkness dominating our purview, whose subject matter feels authentically universal yet allergic to cliche, whose characters are equally clever and open-hearted. Just look at the narrator of “Some Room Left,” a tender ballad whose landscape feels as stark and anxious as Dunne has ever allowed into his songwriting. And yet, he observes, “the fittest of the cynics can be disarmed/By a kindly stranger asking how you are.” It sounds like he’s speaking from experience—on both sides of the conversation—and he’s ready to let in the world.

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Dead Gowns

How does one cope with the pang of desire? It’s the tender, sometimes volatile question that confronts Genevieve Beaudoin on her debut full-length as Dead Gowns.

A deft lyricist with a sweeping range of poetic color and texture, Beaudoin paints her story in dark romantics, presenting a woman in the high summer of adulthood deciphering life’s capacity to fulfill desires or let them go painfully unmet. These cravings – to be touched, to be known, to have just one more encounter with someone lost to time – are a lacuna Beaudoin prods at insistently throughout the album’s twelve songs.

Though never named outright, Beaudoin’s home in Maine – and its ragged, granite-strewn coastline – is an evocative character inhabiting the album, a force even more implacable than Beaudoin’s emotions. Also present is the acute awareness of time passing. Pulled from an Eileen Miles poem, the album’s title, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow, evokes a feeling of disorientation and the inevitability of change. External and internal forces charge Beaudoin, her inner world shifting much like the dizzying change of the seasons. “We get swept up in the blizzard, and then we are set down in the hot salty haze of August,” she says, remembering the Maine winters of her childhood.

By the album’s end, Beaudoin holds her longing in the balance, no longer overcome but embodied. And if you listen carefully – these songs will pick you up and put you down again, transformed, raw, and satiated.

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