I’ve been discovering a lot of new music
lately. Over the weekend I picked up Sharon Van Etten’s new album “Remind Me
Tomorrow,” Graham Parker’s 1979 record “Squeezing Out Sparks” three Marissa
Nadler records and the Phoebe Bridgers/Conor Oberst collaboration “Better Oblivion
Community Centre.”
Fun fact: this next album is another artist Bridgers collaborates with, performing with her in the band “Boygenius.”
Disc 1236 is… Historian
Artist:
Lucy Dacus
Year of Release: 2018
What’s up with the
Cover?
After the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind greet humanity one of
them received a gift of bubble gum from a small child in attendance.
Tragically, the alien didn’t realize that the combination of the lighter
atmosphere of earth – even more pronounced in the mountains – could lead to catastrophe!
How I Came To Know
It: I’d
heard of Lucy Dacus in my musical wanderings but hadn’t thought to go buy any
album. Then my friend Mark bought me this record as a gift, which gave me a
chance to explore her in more depth.
How It Stacks Up: This is the only Lucy Dacus album I have so
there is nothing to stack it up against.
Ratings: 3 stars
Sometimes you can admire a record and still realize it isn’t for you. This
is the conclusion I reluctantly came to with “Historian”. Lucy Dacus is a talented
writer and singer with a long and successful career ahead of her, but there
were elements of “Historian” that kept me from giving my heart to it.
Dacus is a dreamy indie-pop artist who sings with a haunting lilt. It is
impressive that despite all the air and expanse in her delivery her tone
remains rich and powerful. She’s like a ghost that haunts the parlour but you
don’t mind so much because she sings so beautifully.
The record starts strong, with “Night
Shift” a poignant tale of a relationship that has gone so wrong that the
narrator takes a night shift just so she’ll see less of her partner who works 9-5.
I’ve heard a few different versions of love songs where the love has gone cold,
but this was a pretty novel combination of loathing, regret and avoidance. It
made me think of stories when a couple breaks up under bad circumstances but neither
one can afford to immediately move out.
The song has solid dynamics, ranging from the light echo of a single
piano through to a fuzzed-out guitar reverb, with Dacus’ vocals providing a
constancy that the relationship she sings about has long since abandoned. That
fuzzed-out guitar reverb gets a bit oppressive near the song’s end, but I
suppose that’s her point.
There are other solid tracks on “Historian” as well. “Addictions” has some solid jump and
similar skill in moving from a sparse to a lush production and back again. “Nonbeliever” is a song of doubt and
sadness caught in a strangely celebratory Gothic sway. It ends with a bit too
much clangor, but for the majority is solid and compelling both musically and
lyrically.
That issue of the clangor, however, pervades the record. A lot of these songs
start off with interesting melodies but layer upon layer of production leads to
an overlong flourish at the end where I would have preferred another verse to
finish the narrative, or at the very least a musical tag to indicate it was “to
be continued.”
To complain too much about this would be to do the record a disservice. The
music is designed to evoke an emotional cue more than a narrative one. The repetitive
churn of lyric and musical theme at the end of many of the songs is designed
specifically to ramp you up and leave you in the moment of that despair or
longing. For the most part it is well written and effective, but I just wasn’t
feeling it the way it was intended.
Other times I found that there was a snippet of a lyric that gave all
kinds of promise, but Dacus was content to let the single phrase twine around
the music, rather than develop it any further. On “Pillar
of Truth” she sings:
“I am weak looking at you
A pillar of truth
Turning to dust”
That is cool stuff, but Dacus is content to use its repetition to
establish a mood and I wanted to hear more about what came next.
The odd thing was that when I looked up a lot of the lyrics online I
found some pretty thoughtful, soulful stuff. Maybe a few more listens would
have lodged it better in my mind, but at this point it feels a little buried in
all the hum of the production. I found myself longing for a sparser more
organic delivery system.
“Historian” was one of last year’s critical darlings. Pitchfork gave it
an 8.1 and Paste Magazine gave it 8.7. The more I listen to this record, the
more I understand why. These are creative melodies and as an artistic whole,
the record is a thoughtful exploration of lost love and the way that loss
persists.
What it really came down to was personal taste. While the record was
brilliant enough to shine through my own biases, I know in my heart I just won’t
listen to this as much as it deserves. It could live in my house, but in my
heart I know it deserves to be with someone who works the same shift as it does.
That’s not me.
Best tracks: Night Shift, Addictions, Non Believer
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