Forever is a Feeling
by Lucy Dacus
Alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, the inventive Lucy Dacus is one of the women in the Grammy-winning band boygenius.
With that informal group on a hiatus, Dacus again steps out under her own name for a tasteful, thoughtful and sometimes provocative alt-rock set that comes with romantic strings attached, and assistance from singer-songwriters Hozier and Blake Mills, as well as her boygenius pals.
After a brief introduction from treble-forward strings, we’re swept into the shuffling folk and lyrical intensity of Big Deal, where Dacus sounds convincingly worn down by the end of a relationship (“everything comes up to the surface in the end, even the things we’ve not even spoken …”), the more assertive and sensual heat of Ankles (“pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed … I’m not going to stop you this time”) and the swooning piano ballad Limerence, which sounds transported from a weepy film of the 1940s (“I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon”).
From throbbing drone pop (the sonically claustrophobic guitar noise on Talk) through the narrative about a lover-musician on Bullseye with Hozier as the other party (“wish I could come to the show but I understand, I can’t just walk in like any other fan”) to the quiet melancholy that being separated from your lover can bring on Lost Time, Dacus covers intense matters of the heart.
And she couches her songs in such diverse musical settings that this is like an almanac of emotional seasons gathered and considered over time.
Slow Crush
by Alisa Xayalith
Co-founder of Auckland’s enormously successful electro-pop band The Naked and Famous, LA-based Xayalith has already drip-fed eight of the 10 songs on this debut solo album.
That’s a generous dollop of her contemporary pop and she’s said love and romance led to this album. That’s evident everywhere in her almost adolescent enthusiasm.
On Ordinary Love: “Past lovers in a past life got me messed up and I don’t know why … then you turned up and showed me the sky.”
On Different Light she’s drawn to someone when jealously seeing him with a woman: “You were there the whole time, all it took was you looking in her eyes to see you in a different light.”
On Chaotic: “If you ever, ever, ever stop loving me I think that I would die inside.”
However, as someone closing in on 40, she juggles a self-aware adult perspective while conveying youthful joy or reticence.
On Boys and Guitars: “I know I’m a hopeless romantic even though I’ll be disappointed … there’s something about the song Superstar, it played on and on when I was young, hung up on boys and guitars. I knew nothing about love. I was fanatical making it up. Careful what you wish for, it’s not make-believe like before”.
Alisa Xayalith delivers journal entries caught in the moment as tightly wrapped pop packages.
These albums are available digitally and on vinyl. Lucy Dacus also on CD.
