Lucy Dacus – Home Video
Lucy Dacus, the young singer-songwriter phenom and one part
of supergroup boygenius, has never been afraid to open herself up to the world.
Perhaps even more than her fellow heart-on-their-sleeve band members, Julien
Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, Dacus has built her first two albums around visceral
and often voyeuristic honesty. Home Video is nothing different, in fact,
it takes Dacus’ penchant for nostalgia to its logical end, digging into her
deepest cuts and pouring out the blood.
Her breakthrough,
2018’s Historian, was a dynamic rumination on love, one of the more
biting singer-songwriter albums of recent memory, and one of that year’s best
albums period. It continued the lyrical prowess promised on her debut and displayed
some incendiary guitar work to act as a counterpoint to Dacus’ naked emotional
output. Instead, its follow-up, Home Video, strips that vigor back and
turns the emotion way up.
Nearly every track here works as either a tearjerker or a celebration
of perseverance, never letting itself meander or get too solemn but always
pulling a different heartstring. These songs go a little farther back in Dacus’
history as well, presenting a collection of stories from her youth, cut with
the prescience of hindsight. “Hot & Heavy” opens the record on an upbeat
note, telling a story of an introvert becoming more extraverted and wrapping it
in an arrangement that does the same. As
an opener, it presents the key to Home Video, nostalgia drenched in both
pathos and jubilation in equal measure.
On the darker side of the album, “Thumbs”, a concert staple
and frequent album holdover finally finds a proper studio release. As a stately
and deeply personal character study, Dacus unravels the story of an absent father
who has done a lot worse than just be absent. She doesn’t hold back in showing
her disdain and loathing either, excising a brutality that never comes off as unwarranted
even when we don’t know exactly what the father did. Dacus instead isolates
herself and the listener from the relationship, shedding light on the
intricacies and strange nature of blood relationships. “Thumbs” may be the strongest track Dacus has
ever written and its absence of almost any instrumentation leaves the audience
hanging on every word. It’s a darker side of adolescence, but one that’s too
easy to relate to, as Dacus fixates on the frustration of not being able to
alleviate the suffering of someone she cares about.
Dacus’ lyricism is pushed farther on Home Video than ever
before, with each song contributing its own characters and memories and
developing a work tight and succinct enough to be called a concept album. Dacus uses that concept to compile a look back
at her own youth, a work of suburban angst and dread that benefits wholly from
the maturity of its author. Even more importantly, she has proven once again
that she is amongst her generation’s strongest lyricists.
~9.0
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