boygenius: Baker Bridgers Dacus LLC

do you mean "graceland too" from punisher?

ha yes, that's what I meant, which I realized about 20 minutes after posting that but figured whatever.

lol my dad (who will be 79 this year) just sent me and my siblings a link to the boygenius WFUV performance and said, "I like this quite a bit - pretty ambient, also very melodic." Dad otm.

I love this EP, spent all afternoon playing it.

evident from “$20” that julien baker is writing the pedro the lion records for the kids of today

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Wednesday, 18 January 2023 23:37 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Feel like Little Oblivions was in truth a superlative emo album.

average indie group act number 345963468753846239486523474293673249678342596732948673429867239846983246376456348653487something

Not as caustic as usual.

I love these songs and it reminded me of how much I loved the prior EP and that in turn got me thinking about how fascinating Baker, Bridgers and Dacus are as a group, the parallels and divergences between them make it feel like such a fantasy football type concept.

Like, Baker is such a gut punch, five shots of gin neat songwriter and performer, totally immersing you and holding you under the surface of her caustic self-assassinations. And Dacus is... not superior to that, not trying to be cerebral, not even particularly together per se, but such a wise and omniscient narrator including because she's the forgiving but unforgetting, like the kind of close friend you'd ask to write the big speech for your milestone birthday or wedding because you know they'd be unsparing but spot-on. And then Bridgers is like the perfect midpoint between those two spaces, always negotiating the distance between your fucked-up-ness and hers, and so sharply observing of both poles on that continuum. And that flows through to their music and performances: between Baker's wracked, claustrophobic presentness and Dacus's warm, smooth clarity of hindsight is Bridgers' throbbing spectrality, the moment when the present just begins to slip into the past, your awareness of it a sign that it's already passing.

who sings "$20"?

I love the random HOW LONG'S THAT CHEVY BEEN ON CINDERBLOCKS

Tim F otm about their relative strengths and artistic personas, they balance each other in interesting ways.

That's Baker singing lead on $20 right? With Dacus and then Bridgers coming in.

Yes. Baker sings first, if that helps.

mama told me that it don't run
on wishes but that i should have fun
pushing the flowers that come up
into the front of a shotgun
so many hills to die on

“$20” doesn’t really sound like anything Baker has done before, right? I feel like it was definitely worked up from the three of them jamming. Whereas “Emily I’m Sorry” and “True Blue” could both be songs which Bridgers and Dacus respectively brought to the sessions almost fully-formed and then the trio augmented.

That's my take too.

Yeah "$20" def feels more like a collaboration. Hope the album has more of that.

well yes the instrumentation and backing vocals, and the outro I guess, but verses sound very julien baker to me

even through the somewhat upbeat riff her voice and melodic sense reach for my tear ducts

It definitely still feels very julien baker, just a modified version of baker that might not have emerged in a different context.

"Souvenir" on the previous EP was like that too (whereas "Stay Down" feels like a song she brought to the session).

The other thing I like thinking about with this trio is how much their songs are apt to mutate in this context.

I think Dacus's songs are the most unyielding in a particular sense - less so on "True Blue" (which just feels like Dacus through and through, and I love it for that), but definitely on "Bite The Hand" and "Salt In The Wound" (where the most memorable moment in a field of memorable moments is Baker wailing along to "I'm gnashing my teeth like a child of Cain / if this is a prison, I'm willing to buy my own chain") it's like the songs go as far as they possibly can to take the benefit of the trio environment, but they still end up sounding like Dacus songs. But the flipside of that is that the Dacus songs on the 2018 EP sound more like songs from 2021's Home Video than they do like songs from the contemporaneous Historian, as if her songwriting is some form of metal that just absorbs the strength of anything that is thrown at it, and then redeploys that strength afterwards.

Bridgers' songwriting is predisposed to work in the Boygenius context - she already likes multitracking her vocals, so the further refraction of the harmonies just feels like an extension of her existing predilections - such that she can kind of give over her songs to the band context comfortable in the knowledge that whatever emerges still could have dropped into one of her albums without comment.

Baker's songs are the ones where it's like, "okay, this is either a Baker song or a Boygenius song" is a decision that needs to be made at the outset, perhaps because of how much she fills up the space of her songwriting with her personality on her own songs. Making space for others has to necessitate a different approach.

you really have great ears Tim F

alright, officially excited to hear this album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIX_ouNJsTs

Calling it now: album of the year.

I love this song. I love how the last line of the verses is also the first line of the choruses. I love how it is the most comprehensive blending of their songwriting and performance impulses yet. I love that the three artists currently operating who are most adept at creating a vibe of standing outside yourself and being able to expertly chronicle your flaws but also having no idea how to start unpicking the bad stitches in the mess of a cross-stitch you have made… found eachother and formed a band.

That video does more to make Phoebe Bridgers seem like a fun normal human rather than a intimidatingly skilled songwriter / cool kid / budding celebrity / ice queen than anything she's ever done, I think.

Also I'm obsessed with Julien's behavior on the roller coaster at :53-1:08

otm and otm

what a beautiful song

big fan of the sheryl crow tune too wonder if there's a slight inspiration from the vh1 storytellers stevie nicks interaction given the joyous touring video

They were at the annual Tibet benefit at Carnegie Hall last night and unveiled another new song, "Cool About It."

Great song, even if these are the four best songs on the album that would be a good album.

Bought tickets for one of the UK shows today - going with my daughter who is a megafan; the EP is huge in our lockdown mythos. Ethel Cain supporting, which is pretty great.

“I don’t know why I am not strong enough to be your man / I lied, I am, just lowering your expectations”

otm

I tried, I can't
Stop staring at the ceiling fan and
Spinning out about things that haven't happened

I've tipped over into the "this song gives me chills" zone

Almost as fun as the song itself is imagining them sitting around thinking up all these rejoinders to the Sheryl tune.

here's my tiny and pointless quibble: i wish they had repeated "go home alone" at the end one more time and kept the music going to accommodate it.

otherwise, no notes!

Good profile
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/24/indie-supergroup-boygenius-phoebe-bridgers-lucy-dacus-julien-baker-stuff-of-life

Sold!

There’s no mistaking those individual voices. But the power of boygenius is how something weird, unpredictable, and slightly dangerous happens when these three musical minds meld. All over The Record, they prove they’re a band that can do it all, hitting peaks together that can’t be reached any other way.

…

All over The Record, they keep recombining their individual styles into a different kind of chemistry for each song. That’s why they transcend any kind of “supergroup” cliché. After all, supergroups are a dime a dozen compared to actual great bands. And boygenius leave no doubt about where they stand.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/boygenius-the-record-1234704024

supergroups are a dime a dozen compared to actual great bands?

not sure i buy that.

Depends what you mean by "supergroup" I suppose. Just this week I learned of the existence of the Winery Dogs, who are allegedly a "supergroup" because they include a guy who used to be in Dream Theater and a guy who was briefly in both Poison and Mr. Big.

But I get what he's saying, rhetorical excess aside. boygenius feels like a band.

i agree with that. maybe i am too generous with the word "great," also

Is that Rob S’s review tipsy is referring to?

'tis.

nice piece on Stereogum too, if you can wade thru the ads.

Something about the way Sheffield leans into his enthusiasms so credulously makes me reflexively suspicious, but in this case I really want to believe.

I like that he picks up the switch up to the arrangement for the second verse of “Not Strong Enough”, though I had assumed it was intended to be a reference to The Cure rather than New Order.

I'd be more skeptical if we weren't already four songs to the good. Sometimes you just have those albums where everyone is like, yup. Looking forward to finding out.

My good people

This album

I keep checking a certain site for a download.

I ordered the album this morning.

it's good but i'm not blown away or anything, which is how i generally feel about their solo work

I'll have to listen to this later in the morning after I get some sleep - I could barely stay awake through the quiet ones that loaded up the back half and it sounded like there were some beautiful sentiments expressed in those lyrics - but I really liked a big chunk of this, particularly the more uptempo numbers like "Satanist," which may be my favorite track.

"You think you're a good person cuz you won't punch me in the stomach."

god, “satanist”

i am so hyped for the next julien baker record

*listens to “satanist” on repeat* the core, the heart music… desaparecidos… pedro the lion

Oh god, 'Letter to an Old Poet'.

"Satanist" is like "Some Kinda Love": every line startles me.