Review: Chanel Beads at The Naval Store
Chanel Beads at Naval Store
w/ Blood Knows
Wednesday, June 3, 2026
DJ Lael’s opening selections pushed the Naval Store towards club territory before either live act appeared. Less crowded than Wednesday’s sold-out appearance the week prior, the extra breathing room suited the music. People chatted, drifted and danced rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder awaiting a rock show.
The Naval Store remains something of a compromise. It can generate volume and atmosphere in abundance, but its warehouse bones tend to betray the audiophile. Still, nobody seemed especially concerned on this particular night. For music built from texture, repetition and feeling rather than technical fidelity, the room’s capacity for movement mattered far more than its acoustic shortcomings.
But back to what Arrival does well: For all the attention inevitably lavished on international headliners, one of Arrival’s quieter successes is its commitment to local supports. Rather than treating Perth artists as an afterthought, the festival consistently places them in meaningful conversation with its visiting acts.
Perth producer and songwriter Blood Knows (Leigh Craft) opened with a set far more upbeat than descriptors such as ambient-electro or dream-pop might suggest. Walking onstage alone with a guitar, Craft immediately established a warm presence, accompanied by pre-recorded beats glowing with a distinctly retro sheen.
There were shades of Toro y Moi and Neon Indian’s chillwave heyday, while the larger hooks and washes conjured M83’s euphoric synth-pop. On last year’s release, Motto, Craft’s vocal delivery even suggested a more dancefloor-minded Kevin Parker. Whatever the reference points, though, these songs wanted movement rather than introspection.
Joined by a female vocalist, Bumblebee transformed its titular insect into a bouncing bop driven by elastic rhythms that snapped like bubblegum. On other cuts, the vocal harmonies elevated the material considerably, balancing sweetness with propulsion, while a guest appearance from Business Partner reinforced the communal spirit underpinning the project. If some songs prioritised vibe over lyrical depth, they nevertheless succeeded in warming the room and coaxing bodies into motion.
While Blood Knows dealt in atmosphere, Chanel Beads explored something stranger altogether.
Much has been written about Shane Lavers’ New York project as dream-pop, trip-hop, ambient music or experimental indie. Live, those descriptors quickly proved inadequate. On the eve of releasing a second album, teasingly titled Your Day Will Come (again), Chanel Beads presented a vision of contemporary music-making that felt fragmented, porous and defiantly post-genre.
The stage itself hinted at this instability. Cymbals flared above the drum kit like antennae searching for a signal, while a violinist occupied one flank and an electronically treated clarinet drifted in and out of the arrangement. Throughout the performance, the band remained largely backlit, silhouetted against a single static image: the looming gargoyle glare from their forthcoming record.
The opening piece emerged from apparent disorder. Glitching samples, swelling strings and distant hollering gradually settled into coherence, though never entirely into comfort. Static hiss and distortion remained embedded in the music like artefacts deliberately left visible, reminders of the human hand inside increasingly digital sounds.
Tracks from 2024’s Your Day Will Come were met with enthusiastic recognition. I Think I Saw paired pulsing violin with tender vocal interplay, while Unifying Thought rocked harder than their recordings might suggest. New single Song for the Messenger drew one of the night’s strongest reactions, its opening vocal sample dissolving beneath layers of fuzz before Lavers delivered lines balancing self-recrimination and biblical imagery.
What consistently distinguished Chanel Beads was their relationship to texture. The drumming possessed extraordinary tactility, softening impacts without sacrificing physicality, while strings and synths continually shifted between smoothing surfaces and introducing friction.
Lavers himself proved an equally fascinating focal point. Rarely tethered to a single spot, he bounced around the stage with the restlessness of a hip-hop hype man, gesturing emphatically and throwing his body into phrases. His vocal delivery sat somewhere between emo confession, punk abrasion and grunge pathos. The rasp, cracks and strained emphases carried emotional information regardless of whether individual lines could be deciphered.
Songs repeatedly returned to memory, regret and mortality. The Coward Forgets His Nightmare continued the memento mori inflection of their first record, while Embarrassed Dog’s trip-hop click-clacking underscored Lavers’ dry-throated weariness. Idea June Video fed unrequited longing and the irresistibility of troublemakers through an MBV filter, while Police Scanner intertwined violin and vocal harmonies before allowing its titular phrase to land with profound mechanical hollowness.
A late run through unreleased material could perhaps have been better integrated throughout the set, but it was a minor quibble. The recurrent echoes of shoegaze, trip-hop, indie rock and emo-rap bled throughout, never as nostalgia but as refraction. Genres functioned less as identities than ingredients. An embodiment of the way listeners and artists actually engage with culture now, fragmented and cross-disciplinary.
As strong as Cate Le Bon and Wednesday had kicked off Arrival, nothing else this week felt quite as current as Chanel Beads. By the time True Altruism closed beneath blinding white light and a surge of cathartic noise, Chanel Beads had achieved something increasingly rare. They sounded neither like a revival nor a reference point.
They sounded like right now.
CAT LANDRO
Photos by Thomas Earnshaw
