Among her many musical attributes, Lucy Dacus’ greatest quality might be her voice. It’s a uniquely expressive and timeless-sounding instrument. When she sings, she can emote in a way that feels both operatic and restrained, like Edith Piaf on SSRI’s. It’s what has enabled Dacus, at her best, to put over songs that lyrically sketch intimate scenes that read as relatable and lived-in on the page, but as music take on the scope of grand, life-changing melodrama. It can evoke the intensity of falling love for the first time, or experiencing the worst heartache in your life, or even both sensations simultaneously.
But when Dacus’ songs don’t quite hit the mark, that voice can also hem her in. Dacus does not typically shout or whisper — that voice pretty much sticks to the same smoldering frequency for every occasion. It’s up to the music surrounding that voice, therefore, to supply some dynamics. On some of her most loved songs, like “Night Shift” or “I Don’t Want To Be Funny Anymore,” Dacus’ melancholic vocals are complemented by loud guitars, like sweet jelly matched by gritty, crunchy peanut butter. But when the music veers into what I’ll call the “Triple A Radio Zone” — the folk-inflected soft rock that populates the public radio affiliate in your town — the effect can be like eating a heavy lunch or drinking a Bloody Mary for breakfast. That mellifluous purr will lull you into an untimely slumber.
Such is the case with Forever Is A Feeling, Dacus’ debut for Geffen Records and the first record from any of the Boygeniuses since their magical run of arena shows and Grammy Awards a few years back. There are advantages and disadvantages to being the earliest post-zeitgeist canary in the coal mine. Pluses include a considerable media push, with late-night talk show appearances and a glowing profile in The New Yorker that describes her supergroup as “a kind of generational loadstone, a flash of hope in an era defined by catastrophic backsliding.”
The potential downside, however, is that it’s awfully tough to follow up on the “headlining Madison Square Garden” chapter of your career. Expectations, naturally, are going to be sky-high, particularly when you’re the one putting out music first. And yet Dacus does not appear overly concerned with knocking her audience’s socks off. Forever Is A Feeling has a noticeably mellower pitch than her previous records. Dacus’ recent admission to a relationship with bandmate Julien Baker was, perhaps, inevitable given the homey and grateful love songs that populate the record. It’s possible Boygenius’ obsessive fan base would have heard a line like “If the Devil’s in the details / then God is in the gap in your teeth” (from “For Keeps”) and not immediately think of Baker. But it’s unlikely, just as they would have picked up on the part in “Modigliani” — named after the famous 20th century Italian painter and sculptor — where Dacus swoons, “I like watching you win over a new crowd / You can make ’em go wild, you can leave ’em spellbound / But you will never be famous to me.” To Dacus’ credit, these references don’t feel exploitative, but rather like extensions of the diaristic songs she has always written. Though she, unsurprisingly, also seems far more contented now.
Personal fulfillment, of course, is what one would wish for any person, even a singer-songwriter known for sometimes conveying extreme emotional distress. All the public can reasonably hope for from an artist are tunes that stick in your head and linger in your heart. In that department, Forever Is A Feeling is considerably less eternal that the album’s starry-eyed title. Produced mostly by Dacus with the assistance of the suddenly ubiquitous Blake Mills — he’s also on recent releases by Japanese Breakfast and Perfume Genius — Forever resides in a frustratingly mushy mid-tempo lane outfitted with twinkly string sections and gentle guitar strums and fluttery piano licks. The music, while well-crafted, is dully repetitive, particularly nondescript fare like “Talk” and “Come Out” that could have appeared on any of the countless Boygenius-inspired singer-songwriter releases from the past few years. That goes double for the light shuffle “Bullseye,” featuring a court-ordered cameo from Hozier, the current grand poobah of the Triple A Radio Zone.
It wasn’t always like this. At the risk of sounding like a broken record when it comes to criticizing new albums by indie stars, I couldn’t help but think back to Dacus’ 2016 debut, No Burden, which established her as an easy-to-root-for underdog. On that album, she was often compared to Courtney Barnett, the sly Australian singer-songwriter with a hankering for heavy, quasi-grunge guitars. And, lo and behold, No Burden songs like the heavy-riffing “Troublemaker Doppelgänger” practically sound like Queens Of The Stone Age relative to the rather tepid music Dacus is making now.
Artists evolve, surely, and I don’t expect or want anyone to simply reiterate by rote the sound of their earliest records. But something approaching the energy of “Troublemaker Doppelgänger” is sorely needed to liven up the sleepy Forever. The penultimate track, “Most Wanted Man,” comes closest — a country rocker with Big Star guitar chords, it sounds way looser than the rest of the record, with Dacus reminiscing about splurging for a $700 hotel room at the Ritz and “living the dream before we fully pass our prime.”
Forever otherwise is stuck in a rather boring musical rut. Which only makes some of the lyrical misfires stand out more egregiously. On Boygenius’ The Record, Dacus was dinged for an infamous lyric about Leonard Cohen and his “horny poetry,” which sounded more like an attempt to create a popular meme than a standout song. This habit, unfortunately, continues on Forever Is A Feeling, with my least favorite line coming from the otherwise solid single “Best Guess,” where Dacus repurposes an old Sunday School nursery rhyme with cringey results: “Here is the church / Here is the steeple / You were looking for saints / but you only found people.” I’m also not a fan of the part in “Ankles” where Dacus describes a sexual interlude thusly: “So bite me on the shoulder / pull my hair / and let me touch you where I want to- / there, there, there, there, there.” I’m sorry but this simply is too, too, too, too, too much information.
Dacus is a smart, perceptive artist, and she’s currently navigating the trickiest part of her career. If Forever Is A Feeling feels less than assured, it might be chalked up, charitably, as a valuable learning experience. Here is an example of what not to do. What’s next is bound to be better.
