The golden-voiced Richmond, Virginia singer-songwriter and one-third of the Boygenius trio is the first to return to her solo work – a subtle, candid, understated, richly lyrical, sensitive LP about her troubled relationship, decorated with fingerpicked acoustic guitar, piano, orchestral strings and harp. The sounds here are often lush, bathed in reverb, dreamy, yet many of the songs relate to her tricky relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Julien Baker, gentle admissions of mutual flaws, tenderness, longing, failure and falling out of love. Big Deal opens up this with quite profound beauty: “Flicking embers into daffodils/ You didn’t plan to tell me how you feel/ You laugh about it like it’s no big deal/ Crush the fire underneath your heel / I’m surprised that you’re the one who said it first/ If you had waited a few years, I would’ve burst/ Everything comes up to the surface in the end / Even the things we’d rather leave unspoken.” Ankles, is gentle, catchy folk-chamber pop hovering about the habituals of day-to-day relationship and communication: “I want you to show me what you mean/ Then help me with thе crossword in the mornings.” Limerence is a gorgeous, almost old-fashioned piano romantic number, oddball in how it refers to friend Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood explaining the meaning of word while Dacus eats popcorn, but then realising more about her own relationship. “I'm thinking about breaking your heart someday soon / And if I do, I'll be breaking mine too.” Modigliani shows further clever imagery with “‘Loving father, friend and son’” / Printed backwards on my shoulder blade/ From leaning back on a plaque on a bench” - an impression left literally and metaphorically while she was writing a song and sitting their for long. The album breaks into understated fuzz guitar on Talk, a song about poor communication, and so the album continues with the almost, the what might be, what we should have done, with lines such as “we are not something, we are not nothing”, “nothing lasts for ever, but we’ll see how far we get”, “you are my best guess at the future”. Other highlights include Best Guess, Bullseye (with Hozier), For Keeps, Lost Time, the title track, and the bursting urge to express in Come Out. Subtly powerful, a detailed portrait of a slow-motion tragedy, a magical sort of melancholy packed with insights, honesty and brave, bittersweet beauty. Out on Geffen Records/ Polydor.
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