Adventures in Listening, April 7, 2023: Indie Rock Jamboree
New albums from boygenius, The Hold Steady, and The New Pornographers. Plus: Revisiting a classic from The White Stripes.
boygenius - The Record
If you’re at all familiar with the members of boygenius— if you’ve spent any kind of time with the solo work of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, or Lucy Dacus— then you already know a few things about The Record. You know, for example, that the songs are very sad and frequently funny— nearly as quotable as an episode of Succession. You know that the songcraft is confident and assured, while the characters who populate the songs are often beset by insecurity and self-doubt. You might even know, or at the very least assume, that the proceedings come with Taylor Swift’s coveted seal of approval.
There are also some things you might not know. One of the biggest surprises for me was the warmth of this record. Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus can all be caustic wits, and all have a penchant for deadpan humor during interviews or on social media. Because of that, I wasn’t prepared for the earnestness with which The Record— both in its sound and its content— conveys a genuine camaraderie, a shared affection, an unforced friendship. With the exception of three or four quasi-solo cuts, the songs here were all written together and are often performed with rich, tag-team harmonies. The lyrics are about the joys and pains of intimacy, and it often feels like the fondest lyrics are the ones boygenius wrote about each other. Evidently the group thought about titling this The White Album, but that would have been all wrong: While that classic album was the sound of four men pulling apart, The Record bears witness to three women who are leaning into one another. (Turns out the real supergroup was the friends we made along the way.)
Given the egalitarian nature of this group— they share writing credits throughout, and often the person singing a particular line isn’t the one who wrote it— it’s a fool’s errand trying to sort through who’s really responsible for what. Still, I can’t help but assume it’s Baker, a one-time hardcore frontwoman, who pushed for the inclusion of some more rock-oriented numbers; she headbangs her way through a song called “Satanist” and peels off 90s alt-rock riffs on the shaggy dog story “$20,” both welcome jolts of energy on an album that’s mostly comprised of slow, sad songs. If you’re a connoisseur of that kind of thing, you’ll probably love the songs on which Bridgers takes the lead, including her more-or-less solo showcase “Emily I’m Sorry.” Me, I find these to be the thinnest-sounding, sleepiest cuts on The Record, and the inclusion of the rockers is a big part of why I prefer this album to, say, Bridgers’ Punisher. But I’m totally here for the Lucy Dacus of it all: On “True Blue” she builds simmering pop perfection, while “We’re in Love” proves once again that she’s unparalleled at delivering absolute heartbreakers. Best of all are the songs that most fully celebrate all three voices. The trio of verses on “Cool About It” attest to a band with varied perspectives but a common sensibility. As U2 might sing, they’re one, but they’re not the same.
The close-knit spirit of The Record makes it fitting that the lyrics are all about living in real relationship with other humans— friends, lovers, and bandmates. Sometimes boygenius explores intimacy implicitly, simply in their proliferation of shared reference points and in-jokes. (My favorite punchline is a classic Dacus deadpan: “I told you of your past lives, every man you’ve ever been/ It wasn’t flattering.”) But just as often, intimacy is both text and subtext. “True Blue” offers a pithy summary: “It feels good to be known so well/ I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself.” A few tracks later, on a very funny song called “Leonard Cohen,” Dacus offers this chaser: “I might like you less now that you know me so well.” Much of The Record occupies the tension between these realities, how knowing and being known by someone can be joyful, terrifying, and disappointing all at the same time. But what boygenius prove again and again is that it’s generally worth the effort.
The Hold Steady - The Price of Progress
It’s been almost 20 years since The Hold Steady recorded a song called “How a Resurrection Really Feels.” The title is an apt description for my own relationship with the band. After the one-two punch of Separation Sunday and Boys and Girls in America— still two of the most ambitious and exciting rock and roll albums of the millennium— I was ready to follow them anywhere. By the time they lapsed into torpid self-parody on Heaven is Whenever and Teeth Dreams, my enthusiasm for them was as good as buried. To my astonishment, they began to roll away the stone on Thrashing Thru the Passion and Open Door Policy, and with their new album The Price of Progress, I’m once again ready to name them among America’s most interesting rock bands. This is the best music they’ve made since their exhilarating first act.
The band— now a six-piece, following their reunion with erstwhile keyboardist Franz Nicolay— has figured out something that eludes many of their peers, which is how to age gracefully without losing the spark that made them exciting in the first place. This is no longer a band that’s singularly committed to rowdy, beer-soaked singalongs, to rambunctious riff-fests, or to stadium-swelling anthems decorated by E-Street piano and Purple Rain guitar solos. Their music does not move at the same speed or maintain the same energy that it used to. But what they’ve sacrificed in piledriving momentum, in volume and sheer aggression, they’ve made up for with newfound sensitivity, a flare for theatricality, a painterly sense of detail. Maybe that doesn’t sound very rock and roll on paper, but it’s amazing how their conjuring of rich textures and vivid hues keeps these songs sounding lively and energized. You can hear it on “Grand Junction,” a stately setpiece that moves from scene to scene with cinematic bravado, at one point chiming along with syrupy synths (their E-Street cosplay now reaching the Born in the USA era), the next minute erupting into a boisterous Billy Joel showtune. Toward the very end, the rock and roll muscle comes in: Pounding drums, the briefest of cathartic guitar solos. It’s not the kind of thing they would’ve made 20 years ago, but it is dramatic, vigorous, and enthralling, bearing a thrilling sense of grandeur and scope. It evinces a band that can create kinetic energy not just through force, but through nimbleness, elasticity, and chemistry.
The whole album is filled with songs like that, telling evocative stories through texture and sonic detail: “Understudies” is a shady, hard-boiled noir, while “The Birdwatchers” punctuates its guitar rock with skronking free jazz. “Sixers” is basically an entire opera in just over four minutes. And if you just want to hear them rock out, rest assured: “Sideways Skull” proves that they can still work up a decent boogie, while “Carlos is Crying” punctuates quiet moments with rumbustious thrash. Craig Finn remains the lovable narrator at the center of all these stories, half-singing and half-speaking grown-up vignettes about dreams deferred, expectations lowered, and teenage dreams swapped for middle-aged realities. “We didn’t mind being broke— now every conversation I have is about money,” laments the title character in “Carlos is Crying,” suddenly unsure how his youthful idealism faded into suffocating responsibilities.
Tellingly— crucially— the song doesn’t end there. At the outset of the story, Finn’s narrator is embarrassed to find his friend-since-adolescence— now a grown-ass man— sobbing in public. But by its end, he has reached a place of empathy. He doesn’t have any solutions for Carlos’ problems, but he does have a deep well of compassion: “I love you! I feel you! I know that you’re hurting!” Finn’s shed some of his songwriting tics— there’s not as much lapsed Catholicism or rock and roll myth-making as there used to be— but the affection he has for his characters has only deepened with age. So when the couple in “Grand Junction” feels suddenly dwarfed by the vistas of the American West— “it seemed all the mountains were mocking our own little pitiful lives”— we’re not meant to pity them nor sink into despair, but rather find some solace in common experience. These songs are animated by sympathy and understanding, and that’s reflected in the camaraderie you hear between the musicians. The Hold Steady are, once more, pretty close to the peak of their powers. And it’s great to have them back.
The New Pornographers - Continue as a Guest
If power pop is a science— a careful calibration of big melodies and crunching guitar riffs— then it’s one the New Pornographers mastered at least two decades ago. Their command of their idiom is so pitch-perfect that any little variation registers as a seismic stylistic shift, as when they got quiet and introspective on 2007’s Challengers. Continue as a Guest isn’t quite that big of a curveball, but it does find the venerable band shaking things up a bit, recording at home for the first time and coming up with an appealingly rough-hewn sound. Here they write swirling, circular melodies, dress them up in typically beautiful harmonies, then decorating everything with noodley synths, rattling percussion, and frequent contributions from sax man Zach Djanikian. It is still recognizable as a New Pornographers record— what other band combines timeless melodies and nerdy lyrics so evocatively as to get the phrase “Overton Window” stuck in your head for days at a time?— but with an endearingly homespun vibe that befits songs about isolation and societal collapse. Or at least I think that’s what they’re about. With this band, I find that the meaning is usually in the sound itself, making this a slightly darker, more insular variation on familiar themes. Song to sample: “Really Really Light,” an instant earworm, and one of just a couple of songs to boast a credit from former/occasional member Dan Bejar.
The White Stripes - Elephant: Deluxe Edition
The album you know and love, now available in a 20th anniversary edition to remind you of just how incredibly old you are. There’s an entire live concert recording tacked on, allowing you to hear Jack and Meg work up a ruckus on “Hotel Yorba,” slash and burn through a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lovesick,” play some old blues chestnuts, and dip into some obscurities from their first couple of albums. Of course the concert version of “Ball and Biscuit” slaps. And of course Elephant itself sounds as thunderous, weird, and perfect as ever.