Dacus is unafraid of highly personal lyrics

Offering some hope for the rest 2

of us, Lucy Dacus isn’t entirely sure what the world is going to make of her stellar sophomore album, Historian. The early reviews suggest that the Virginia singer-songwriter has made one of the great records of 2018, moving beyond the guitar-centred indie pop of 2016’s No Burden for a lusher, often almost orchestral sound. The deliciously drawled vocals and serrated guitars are still there, but they are fleshed out by cinematic violin and pizzicato cello (“Yours and Mine”) and springtime-in-paris horn arrangements (“Body to Flame”).

Thanks in part to raves by Pitchfork, Paste, and Rolling Stone, the Matadorreleased outing has earned universalacclaim honours on the aggregatereview site Metacritic. Dacus has hit the road for Historian wondering if the people that really matter—her fans— are going to embrace a record that’s as heavy as anything you’ll hear this year. Her concerns make sense when you consider that self-doubt, loss, anxiety, and mortality are frequent touchstones on the album’s 10 tracks.

“Every time someone says that they care about the record, I feel a little flutter of victory,” she says, speaking on her cellphone from a tour stop somewhere in the southern United States. “Because I care about it so much, I really hope that it translates. It feels like right now there’s a lot of attention on the record, and that makes sense because it just came out. But who knows how it will unfold from here. I really hope it’s one of those records that sticks with people.”

Dacus saw that recognition coming after No Burden got her pegged as a DIY breakout artist in 2016. Critics and indie-rock aficionados embraced songs that weren’t afraid to pull back the curtain on her personal life. It takes guts to come out and admit you aren’t the coolest kid at the lunch table, something the singer had no reservations about doing on No Burden

numbers like “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore”. (Sample lyrics: “Is there room in the band? I don’t need to be the frontman/if not, then I’ll be the biggest fan.”)

Historian is even more personal, unflinchingly dealing with everything from dying relationships (“Night Shift”) to crippling anxiety (“Next of Kin”) to finding beauty in the sadness of death (“Pillar of Truth”).

With highly personal revelations like those come questions when it’s time to start meeting fans and dissecting lyrics in interviews. Dacus is prepared.

As lyrics like “I’m doing fine, trying to derail my one-track mind” prove, mental health is something she’s had to work on, and the singer openly acknowledges that her battle continues today. One of the great things about what she does for a living is that she has an outlet—something not everyone understands.

“I’m not a sad girl even though sadness is one of the things that I touch on. Negativity in general is one of the things that holds people back, and you have to see what’s holding you back to get away from it. But even though some people have called Historian sad, it’s not only sad, and I really wonder if that has something to do with the way some people approach listening. If they’re used to turning to music as a kind of catharsis because they are sad, it’s easier to focus on the sadness than to use the songs as a way to escape it.” Her ultimate ambition for Historian,

then, is that, no matter how bad things get, people realize there’s always a reason to hope things will get better.

“The content is not necessarily easy,” she admits of Historian. “I think in No Burden there was a lot of positivity on the record. I think Historian is ultimately a positive record, but I was a little bit worried about taking people into a dark world. I tried to do it with as much care as possible, but it’s not easy to ask people to think about death or loss or confusion. A lot of people want to escape from those things—especially with things the way they are today, with people trying to escape negativity. But you sometimes have to go into the darkness in order to see a way out.”

> MIKE USINGER

Lucy Dacus plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Tuesday (March 27).

Ought throws a curve ball with Room Inside the World

Stepping away from something 2

that’s working comes with significant risks—a reality that’s not lost on Ought singer and songwriter Tim Darcy. After earning voluminous praise for its first two full-lengths, the Montreal quartet decided to mix things up for its third outing, Room Inside the World.

Ought first surfaced with a frenetic, buzz-building reimagining of first-wave postpunk. This time out, the songs are all about emotiondrenched, unapologetically theatrical vocals, and they swing majestically from hymnal goth (“Take Everything”) to languid college rock (“Disgraced in America”).

“All I can say is that I completely agree with us taking a risk,” Darcy says, on his cell from a tour van making its way to Detroit. “But I would much rather go down doing something that’s true to what we really want to do. This record was about making the kind of music we wanted to make. That might mean not getting the kind of acclaim you’re hoping for in the moment. But think about how many things you like that weren’t valued at the time. Some new people like it, and some old people don’t like it, but that’s the way it goes.”

Consider Room Inside the World part of a lineage, then, that includes records like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and the Beastie Boys’ infamous curve ball Paul’s Boutique.

Dramatically, Ought files down the abrasive edges that earned Darcy and his bandmates—ben Stidworthy (bass), Matt May (keyboards), and Tim Keen (drums)— favourable comparisons to agitating legends like Wire and the Fall. The American-born Montrealer, quite rightly, suggests instead that reference points like Nick Cave and early New York City punks such as Television and Patti Smith make more sense.

“I think that people are slowly beginning to form their words around the word romantic with the record,” Darcy says. “The cross into a heightened sort of romanticism has been an interesting one for us. I don’t exactly know how to put my finger on what we’ve done except to say that I feel like we’re in a fairly romantic period of music right now.”

And what Darcy likes about that is that what often comes out of romantic periods is change—sometimes social, sometimes artistic, and sometimes both. Think hippies in the ’60s, punks in the ’70s, or rap revolutionaries in the ’80s.

Having first come together during the Montreal student protests of 2012, the band’s members remain very much convinced that all is not lost in the world, despite things sometimes seeming that way.

If that’s a romantic notion, then Darcy will take it.

“I’m very much on the side of hope,” he says. “Not in a naive sense in terms of empty promises, but more hope in sort of concrete things like values and communitybuilding and service work and dialogue. Things we can weave into our daily lives. Taking action and doing something.”

> MIKE USINGER

Ought plays the Cobalt on Saturday (March 24).

Le Vent du Nord remains anchored in Quebec folk

Quebec’s Le Vent du Nord 2

(North Wind) has been blowing through the Southern Hemisphere of late. After performing in Chile in mid-february, the francophone roots band headed far south again in early March to play WOMAD festivals in Australia and New Zealand. The prestigious gigs Down Under highlight the global reach of musicians constantly exploring innovation while remaining anchored in the traditional songs and airs of old Quebec.

“We haven’t often been south of the line before,” says Nicolas Boulerice, who plays hurdy-gurdy and keyboards with Le Vent du Nord, reached at his home near Saintjean-sur-richelieu. “I think something interesting opened up for us in Santiago. We’re starting to realize the huge possibilities of playing in Latin America, where there’s a lot of interest in all kinds of music that’s rhythmic, that gets people dancing. They’re very curious, and there’s a different mentality. People really

see page 28

Historian.

connect with music from Quebec, which is bright and festive.”

When LVDN heads north again to play at Coquitlam’s Festival du Bois, it will be the first opportunity for long-time local fans to hear the band as a quintet. In December, André Brunet, from the trio De Temps Antan (and previously with La Bottine Souriante), added his lead fiddle and talents as a multi-instrumentalist to LVDN. He joins Boulerice, fiddler and foot percussionist Olivier Demers, guitarist Simon Beaudry, and his own younger brother, accordionist Réjean Brunet.

There have long been family, and musical, ties between LVDN and De Temps Antan, in which Beaudry’s brother Eric also plays, and last year they got much tighter. “We decided to create a show together—solo—with LVDN and De Temps Antan on the same stage, as a seven-piece,” says Boulerice. “So we played with André then, and it was a great experience for us—not just musically but personally. Each of us in LVDN, unknown to the others, talked to André and said it would be good to get together again, as we have the same way of approaching and thinking about music. He felt likewise.

“As De Temps Antan needed to slow down on touring for family reasons, while André wanted to work more, he proposed joining us,” Boulerice adds. “And we wanted his energy. André is an unbelievable musician—he’s like a locomotive, that guy. And as we’re playing on bigger stages at larger venues, as a five-piece we boost our sound and fill the space more. André would also enable Olivier [who drums his feet on a board while fiddling] to slow down a bit, because his knees have started to suffer from being used so much over the years.”

The addition of such a dynamic and genial musician is shaking up the ways in which LVDN functions as a band. “After 17 years as a quartet we’ve developed our own ways of doing things,” Boulerice says. “Curiously, I find André gives us greater balance. He’s also a fine guitarist, and when he studied music he specialized in percussion, with piano as his second instrument. We already have around 10 pieces we’re working on with him, and will record our next album later in the year. André is a musician who’s open to every possibility, and in some respects, with him it feels like playing in a new band.”

> TONY MONTAGUE

Le Vent du Nord performs Saturday and Sunday (March 24 and 25) at Festival du Bois in Mackin Park, Coquitlam. With her 2017 release Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, Nicole Mitchell has emerged as one of creative music’s most adventurous futurists, an artist unafraid to turn her early obsession with science fiction into a literary and sonic exploration of Earth as it will be, circa 2099. But she’s not content with simply imagining a gentler, community-based alternative to a crumbling World Union: she’s making her social vision a reality every time she steps on-stage.

Although Mitchell is a born leader, as she proved during her six-year tenure as director of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival’s highschool outreach program, she also fosters an ideology of collective enterprise, making sure that all of her collaborators are given space to be their best selves. It’s a belief that fits well with the aims of Vancouver’s 40-year-old New Orchestra Workshop (NOW) Society, a continuously evolving group of experimental musicians that Mitchell will join in concert this weekend. Reflect the Times, named after what the great singer and pianist Nina Simone believed was the artist’s duty, is a subtly feminist, intentionally multigenerational, and explicitly multicultural celebration of our turbulent era, with Mitchell and two other guest artists—new York City bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and First Nations multi-instrumentalist Jeneen Frei Njootli—joining a dozen local performers, including NOW artistic director Lisa Cay Miller on piano, the Orchid Ensemble’s Lan Tung on

2erhu, and NOW cofounder Ralph Eppel on trombone.

Given that in Mandorla Awakening II’S liner notes Mitchell notes that “Organic expression of diversity was also very important to this project,” it seems a perfect fit.

“In a cultural collaboration, what I’ve found is that it’s really important to make sure that everyone’s authentic voice is heard,” the flautist explains, on the line from her Los Angeles home. “And that means, for me as a composer, to not overcompose or be too controlling.”

One way to ensure that, Mitchell continues, is to use graphic scores, compositions that include visual-art elements or performance instructions as well as, sometimes, more conventional notation. For Reflect the Times, she, Mezzacappa, Njootli, and Miller will all contribute new graphic works; Mitchell will also bring the musical aesthetic she absorbed as a member—and, eventually, president—of Chicago’s famed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

There, she explains, she learned that “each person on the planet is a unique rendition of chemistry and perspective and experience.” “With the AACM,” Mitchell continues, “the idea of being encouraged to create original music is really about getting in touch with your own voice and trying to be as fluent as possible in expressing what that is. And that’s a very different model from a lot of other schools, where there’s a specific concept or a specific musical approach that everybody’s kind of jumping onboard to do—like with spectralism or serialism or all these other approaches. With the AACM, you have all these composers that sound totally different because it’s really about them having the freedom to explore and to be experimental.… in their own way.”

> ALEXANDER VARTY

The NOW Society presents Reflect the Times at the Orpheum Annex on Saturday (March 24).