Lean Year - Sides

There is a moment on Sides, the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo LeanYear, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery,based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex's motheras she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band's second album:dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowingjourney through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synthpads, woodwinds, and Rex's instantly recognizable voice. The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson-who also works as a film director (The Mountain,Entertainment, The Comedy)-originally set out to write an album about conflict, butduring the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number ofpersonal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex's motherreceived a cancer diagnosis, and the couple's beloved family dog, Orca, died. Theseevents transformed the album into an exploration of loss-an attempt at processing thepainful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted withdeath. "We thought we'd do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on allof the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformedeverything/everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record becameabout loss and grief," Rex explains. "In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: ourindividual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feelingof during and enduring. It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposingsides-the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the actof living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knewand what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once. "Sides-produced by Alverson alongside Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings) and featuringcontributions from Elliot Bergman (Nomo, Wild Belle) and Joseph Shabason (Destroyer,The War on Drugs)-has a distinctly cinematic quality, perhaps due in part to Alverson'sother career. Moments of jazz, slowcore, and dirgelike R&B find their way into the sorrowful, ambient suite, lulling the listener into a state of calm while the lyrics speak of ghosts,childhood, and mortality. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, Sides succeeds inmastering a balancing act between pathos and pop. Each song is indelible andhaunting, with melodies that have the kind of broad appeal reminiscent of Karen Dalton,Aldous Harding, and FKA twigs.