Last February, the American “indie rock supergroup” Boygenius – AKA Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – announced an indefinite hiatus. The announcement came a couple of weeks before their solitary album, The Record, won three of the seven Grammys for which it had been nominated. This was a suitably triumphant ending to a project that had been garlanded with acclaim, both for their music – “at the vanguard of keeping rock alive,” as one US magazine editor put it – and their willingness to indulge in attention-grabbing gestures, frequently designed to prick at the male domination of rock history.
Their debut EP came in a sleeve that referenced that of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s eponymous 1969 album. They dressed as the Beatles for an appearance on Saturday Night Live and as Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone. Onstage, they snogged each other, ripped open their shirts and discussed free-bleeding menstruation. They appeared at a Tennessee festival dressed as drag queens, complete with names – including the impossibly winning Queef Urban – to protest against the state banning public drag performances. The memes piled high. By the time the project drew to a close, all three members were substantially more famous than they had been at its inception; Dacus was even namedropped in the title track of Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.
The first “Boy” to return with a solo album, Dacus’s comeback is audibly not much interested in attention-grabbing gestures. It is understated, almost to a fault: for an album that features not just a harp but a guest turn by Hozier – a man not much noted for the subtlety of his vocal approach – there is something striking about its restraint. Dacus and co-producer Blake Mills have opted to paint the whole thing in gentle, warm shades, by turns earthy – fingerpicked acoustic guitar, piano, strings – and misty. A wash of shoegazey guitar and wordless vocals is spread across Talk; the harmonies on Big Deal are so hushed and drenched in reverb that they are barely there. Even when the arrangements are lush – as on Modigliani, home to the aforementioned harp – they are never maximalist: gentle tastefulness prevails. Or when the guitars are distorted, as on Most Wanted Man, they feel strangely muted, mixed way behind Dacus’s vocals. It’s only in the final minute of closer Lost Time that they suddenly surge, briefly bursting into grungy life.
It is a sound that falls squarely into the category of Music That Streams Well – stuff you can imagine floating pleasantly around a coffee shop without distracting anyone from their matcha latte, that can slip with ease on to playlists called things like Indie Chill and Sunday Morning Vibes.
Nevertheless, you feel certain Dacus’s approach has been informed not by thoughts of commerciality (the first verse of Come Out glowers at “old men guessing what the kids are getting into”, by which one assumes she means her major label home) but of content. The songs on Forever Is a Feeling are almost uniformly intimate in tone, largely depicting the romantic relationship between Dacus and her Boygenius bandmate Baker, in terms that are variously fatalistic (“nothing lasts for ever, but we’ll see how far we get”, “you are my best guess at the future”) and glowing: “I love you and every day that I didn’t say is lost time.” She is, it should be noted, a very good lyricist, with a talent for zooming in on significant details and a wit that remains sharp even when professing undying love. “Meeting your family was a trip, seeing what you got from them,” she sings on Modigliani. “For better or for worse.”
The problem with Forever Is a Feeling is that it suggests Dacus is a better lyricist than she is a tunesmith. There are songs with beautiful melodies here, and they occur most often when Dacus leans towards Broadway for inspiration, a style that suits her deep voice: there is a distinct show tune air to Limerence, the most musically striking song here. More often, they settle for being perfectly nice rather than particularly arresting: nothing really grabs you, a state of affairs compounded by the album’s unobtrusive sound.
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As one profile recently noted, Dacus has a fanbase rabid enough to tweet the lyrics of new songs as she’s singing them live: as is the contemporary fans’ wont, they’re also very heavily invested in her relationship with Baker, so they will doubtless be delighted with the details spilled here. Everyone else might find something telling about the verse on Come Out where she sings about wanting to express her love by screaming “from the bottom of my lungs … and if that means I never sing again, at least I’ll know I went out with a bang”. It’s an impulse you wish she had leaned into at least a little more here: the results might have been more striking rather than simply pleasant.
This week Alexis listened to
Girl Group – Yay! Saturday
For a song celebrating a messy night out, Yay! Saturday’s strength lies in its breathy restraint, fabulously at odds with the lyrics: “Fucking hurry up in the toilet ’cos I think I’m dying.”
Source: theguardian.com
