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.