Let’s hear it for boygenius
There are times when you hesitate to write a review because after having done so, you’re likely to put away the reviewed piece, especially if music, as if over and done with. Not so much with the band boygenius, three millennial women whose songwriting and melodic strengths hark back to the days of their elders Crosby Stills and Nash as well as Nirvana.
Lately doing the rounds of Spotify radio is their recently released EP, The Rest, four songs a worthy follow up to their debut album out earlier this year, The Record. They made acquaintance with their publics pre-pandemic courtesy of an EP, that already showed boygenius were no pushover, neither an anachronism in the age of K-pop. Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus play off each other’s skills and musicianship, the result always greater than the sum of their parts.
First noticed them through a series of wire photos where they played a major music festival in the West, three bright voices that gave refuge to the obscurity of a crumbling office. A check on music platforms would reveal their impeccable phrasing, lines broken only the way real poetry could. They have debts to country, shoegaze and grunge, and it doesn’t hurt if they’re queer because blue is the warmest color.
The songs transcend gender anyway, and lyrics could impact either straight, gay, even asexual. Being in love is also like being alone, they sing, what better way to embrace the sorrows.
So many memorable lines that pop up in the potholed drive or ride from home to office and back. In the country flavored Ketchum, ID, three-part harmony led by Dacus confesses they are never anywhere, everywhere they go.
In Not Strong Enough, Bridgers sings the first verse where a black hole opens in the kitchen, while Baker takes the second about drag racing through the canyon, singing boys don’t cry. Based on YouTube excerpts, it is the pixie-like Baker who is the guitar demon that sometimes plays mandolin, she can play with the best of them in an understated manner.
True Blue is pure emo a la Sappho, with more quotable verses, “It feels good to be known so well/ I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself/ I remember who I am when I’m with you/ Your love is tough your love is tried and true blue,” Dacus transforming it into a rock anthem where raucous audience sings along till the end.
In the maiden EP, the standout Me and My Dog by Bridgers has the rare liberating line, “I want to be emaciated” and free of thinking of the other whenever hearing a song and never again crying with the teenagers, just she and her dog heading to outer space to look at an “impossible view.”
This experience is relocated in Voyager from The Rest, when in her solitude every step she takes is like walking on the moon, how non-attachment imparts the lesson of weightlessness.
Songwriting turns of phrase and irony are also boygenius’ strong suit, with references to writers and their sullen craft, particularly showcased in Leonard Cohen and Letter to an Old Poet. The former portrays the nadir of a relationship signified by one’s taking the wrong turn on the highway and adding an hour’s drive, the latter recalling Rilke and an old lover crumbling like the ties between lovers, the slow burn of disconcerting detachment.
In Baker’s Powers, she sings the lines in a hushed though powerful tone, wondering if she acquired the way of the marginalized after falling into a nuclear reactor. Yet being androgyn has its advantages for all its inherent self-mythologizing, ask David Bowie. Song ends, too, with an uncharacteristic brass section, a sly change of pace.
The band has released at least 20 songs overall, all welcome anecdotes as well antidotes to the plethora of junk that pop culture has become these days. So yes, maybe in that way they are an oddity. But at what price this space oddity? You and your dog and the impossible view that is boygeniius.
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