Words by Jason Lee; Cover image by Sofia Zarzuela
Boxes under the bed can be bad news. If you’ve ever seen the movie Basket Case you know what we mean. Or the movie Se7en. Or the movie Girl In The Box—with the boxes in question holding a formerly-conjoined twin turned murderous blob of flesh, the severed head of Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, and a hitchhiker gone missing for seven ffyears, respectively….
…with it being a well-known TV & cinematic trope that anything stored under a character’s bed will end up relating somehow to a deep, dark secret they’ve been keeping which is highly relatable of course even if you keep your secrets in the closet or on a hard drive or merely in your head but bed-wise you can bet your dad once kept a big stash of Playboys and/or Playgirls (Ouis and/or Vivas if he was classy like that) under the bed back in the day given the shame that’d accrue to perusing them in public…
…with shame being one of the two main motivations that we can think of for keeping stuff in a box under your bed (see above) and the second (apart from lack of storage space!) being a counter-balancing sense of shamelessness cuz a box under the bed is exactly where you’d be likely to keep items like personal diaries, journals, scrapbooks (perhaps *ahem* marital aids) intimate forums all for shamelessly pouring out the most personal of thoughts and confessions onto the page, which taken together may help explain why the title of Olive Bernard’s new EP, The Box Beneath My Bed, feels so very apropos…
…what with it being a six-song concept record about shame that shamelessly explores shame’s impact on one’s (in)ability to form and maintain healthy relationships (including with oneself!) with opening track “Born To Be Alone” jumping into things straightaway with an opening lyric that sees Olive gently berating herself for being overly trusting of a new romantic partner but not more than a minute later for being withholding too (“the secrets I keep / the only thing protecting me”) with a music video that perfectly capturing this shafffme vs. shamelessness dynamic (trigger warning: snogging, red jello slurping, green icing application)…
…with the implication being that unlike regular emotions like love, joy, anger, fear, and even guilt which tend to ebb and flow over time and circumstance, shame is more akin to an underlying condition (irrationally convinced that you’re flawed beyond repair and therefore unworthy of love or belonging) that manifests itself in various, sometimes contradictory ways (“If you said something cruel / I’d probably stay / then you’d tell me you love me / I’ll run away”) including “bad behavior” subliminally designed to perpetuate the shame spiral and while this subject matter may lead one to expect The Box Beneath My Bed to sound like outtakes from Jagged Little Pill or Live Through This or even In Utero (un-fun fact: Kurt Cobain was famously and fatally wracked by an all-pervasive sense of shame as explored in the 2015 doc Montage of Heck)…
…but counter-intuitively, Olive keeps the music pared down and spare for the most part with songs rooted in a minimalist bedroom pop aesthetics á la a artist like Jordana, with nods to everything from modestly anthemic pop-rock to avat-synthpop to glittering folk-rock, while keeping things nice ’n’ vibey musically and this is where the notion of shamelessness comes into play or does to our ears anyway cuz musically the EP doesn’t sound all that stressed despite the stressful subject matter with the balletic DIY arrangements and Olive’s breathy, sympathetic delivery being the sonic equivalent of the quilted fabric and crinoline and tassels and fringe adorning an especially well-loved scrapbook kept in a box under the bed…
…with O. Bernard citing musical influences ranging from Frankie Cosmos (“Aftershook”) to Sky Ferreira (“Everything Is Embarrassing”) neither of whom being strangers to writing songs about shame and mortification set to heavenly melodies that make being jaded and aware sound cool but have either of them written a full-on concept EP about shame (we think not!) and did either of them develop and fulfill a self-designed college degree at New York University exploring shame through political history, sociology, and literature (we know not!) ;vvv YEAH YOU HEARD RIGHT, OLIVE MAJORED IN SHAME! thus making this EP effecitvely Olive’s master thesis…
…with track 2 “Treatment” fitting the bill perfectly with lyrics about feeling shame for “trying to win over your love / by withholding from you” set to a gentle folk-rock strum but rather than being a song addressed to a lover or prospective partner it’s written to the narrator’s therapist (!) so in other words it’s a song about feeling ashamed for not confessing one’s deepest, darkest secrets in a shameless bid to impress one’s therapist (which MUST to be a pretty common if rarely acknowledged phenomenon, in fact, we’re done it ourselves!) and here we see how that B.A. in shame comes in handy…
…and then there’s the one about falsely claiming to have “Dinner Plans” as a face-saving strategy, and the one about putting on a “False Front” in the name of seduction featuring an excellent Cars-worthy keyboard lead (see Willa’s spot-on review of the single and interview in the Deli from a little bit back, and also the video featuring four of Olive’s false fronts come to life) and the one about sweeping one’s true feelings (even love!) under the “Rug,” and finally, the one about a girl named “Phoebe” whose “love is the sweetest mystery” (one of a couple songs on the EP completely bereft of drums or electronic percussion) so don’t be afraid to check out The Box Beneath My Bed with the awareness that O. Bernard has said she’ll be putting this particular subject matter to bed by-and-large after this EP and surely there’s no shame in that…
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All songs produced be Olive Bernard and @drewschlingman w/additional production by @elliot.kleinman on “Dinner Plans”
Mastered by @tiny.panther.recording
Photo on cover taken by @veronica__4u
Project roll out artistically supervised by @partyatlouises