A great leap forward
Lucy Dacus ‘Historian’ Matador
Lucy Dacus’ modesty precedes her. Her 2016 debut album, “No Burden,” was a school project that wasn’t necessarily designed to introduce her to the world.
But “it turned out better than I thought it would,” she once said, and so she quit college to see where it would lead.
A deal with Matador Records ensued, and the 22-year-old Virginian took her time with the followup, “Historian” (Matador). It represents a staggering leap. As good as “No Burden” was, “Historian” is better: songs like short stories; sneakily hard-hitting arrangements; dreaminess and catharsis, often in the space of a few verses.
Dacus remains an unassuming yet persuasive singer. She rarely raises her voice, no matter how turbulent the words or the music becomes. She knows the lyrics are strong enough to stand on their own, without histrionics, and her confidence is well-founded: “You take me aside/ To solemnly confide/ When it comes the time/ You plan to give your body to the flame.”
The song, “Body to Flame,” takes its time, with undulating guitars and gently dancing strings creating a meditative atmosphere, and then it opens up, not dramatically but almost elegantly, until it’s surrounding the narrator and pulling her under. She makes the suddenness, the shock, almost matter-of-fact, akin to finding yourself silently rocked by a passage in a great novel, the inside of your head exploding while the world around you remains still.
Mortality and time are the big subjects, the notion that humans hunt for their purpose while combating paralyzing doubt. In “Nonbeliever,” Dacus sings about splitting town, leaving behind home and family, to find whatever’s next. “And if you find what you’re looking for, write a letter and tell us what it is,” she sings, giving voice to those she leaves behind.
Dacus finds perfect foils in mixer John Congleton, producer Collin Pastore and arranger-multiinstrumentalist Jacob Blizard, who flesh out the sound with strings and horns without trampling on the singer or the song. The opening “Night Shift” doesn’t so much surge from a dreamy lullaby into a guitar-crashing rock song as unfold. It introduces an album in which deceptively small songs play bigger than they first appear.
The 10-track album peaks as it enters the final turn. In “Timefighter,” time wins in a “landslide,” as embodied by the guitar that splinters the calm. Yet just as things appear ready to boil, it cuts off — just like that, it’s over.
It sets up “Next of Kin,” in which the narrator comes to terms with the futility of not knowing, of overthinking, of expectations unmet. Her role model may well be the dying matriarch portrayed in the epic, seven-minute-plus “Pillar of Truth.” When Dacus finally raises her voice, for the first and last time on the album, the song goes black.