Review Summary: Yeehaw
“The new Lucy Dacus album is just fine. Where does Sapphic folk go from here?”
This was the headline that Hannah Jocelyn wrote for Xtra Magazine regarding Dacus’ recent
Forever is a Feeling and, while a bit provocative and unfair to levy at Lucy (or anyone in particular), it’s a fair question to ask. I, a heterosexual dude, am wholly unqualified to speak to the sapphic qualities of the question, but it’s hard to deny that Phoebe Bridgers’ breakthrough,
Punisher, has ushered in a gold rush of yearning that has begun to yield diminishing returns as of late. Make no mistake, the feminine and queer shift brought on by Boygenius’s domination was a welcome change,* yielding more enjoyment than I could possibly hope to name here, but the formula has been reverse engineered to the point of near-parody whenever I get served another “Did I Just Write the Song of the Summer?” reel of overly specific lyrics and midtempo nothingness. All this to say, it’s a shame that this oversaturation effect leads to a perfectly cromulent
Forever is a Feeling being met with a shrug and wondering where this whole general scene goes next.
*
Knowledge is liking Bright Eyes; wisdom is wanting Conor Oberst to shut the fuck up.
Send a Prayer My Way finds fellow Boygenius member (and object of Lucy’s affection) Julien Baker saddling up with the criminally underappreciated TORRES to somewhat kick that can down the road with a spurred-up cowboy boot. While the apocalyptic storytelling of the former and the power-pop guitar theatrics of the latter create a familiar undercurrent to draw from , capital-C Country is the name of the game here. Everything from fiddles and banjos to slides and campfire harmonies make an appearance. This isn’t merely trying on a costume, however, it’s a genuine shift of intent as the duo’s voices square dance with each other in an earnest attempt at the genre with some truly evocative storytelling.
Lead single “Sugar in the Tank” is the easiest song to hang your 10-gallon on with its brilliant, soaring power-pop chorus and enough slides to constitute a playground, but its TORRES’ ode to missing her dog while on the road, “Sylvia”, that provides all the proof you’d need that there is gold to be found here (“Haunted by all the goodnights that I’ve missed/Every time your cheek goes unkissed”). The explosive “Tape Runs Out” is a brilliant slow-burn that stretches the possibilities here to their furthest, and replaces a traditional chorus with an eruptions of guitars and fiddles that sound as cinematic as they do haunting. “Downhill Both Ways” and “No Desert Flower” are the closest the record comes to being re-skins of traditional Julien and TORRES solo songs respectively, but work well as reprieves here to remind us where they come from. Even the album’s goofier, campier moments like “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” and closer “Goodbye Baby” feel like well-earned fanservice as the bit is played up to a theatrical degree (“Hey Julien what’s the difference between jelly and jam?/Jelly is more viscous/I’ll tell you off mic”). “Tuesday” is a pretty powerful tale that recalls TORRES’ experiencing religious trauma and homophobia from a past lover’s family and how this shaped the person she became, but even that ends with a showman’s wink (“And one more thing, if you ever hear this song/Tell your mama she can go suck an egg.”)
Send a Prayer My Way likely isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about either artists or the landscape in which they exist, but it is a comfortable uptick in quality that fully capitalizes on its yeehaw gambit. There are a few tumbleweeds in the bunch (“Dirt” is curiously overlong to begin the record; “Showdown” fails to make much of an impression), but this is about as good a curiosity that I would imagine a Julien Baker and TORRES country spinoff to be. It’s evocative, heartfelt fun that will surely be someone’s everything for the upcoming warm season. There are still lingering questions about where this scene can go and what more this scene can do in the future, but tomorrow is another day and seems increasingly like a losing proposition.
Send a Prayer My Way is a hooting and hollering good time for right now.
