Pasa Tempos New albums from Lucy Dacus and Anohni
Records) “I Don’t Want To Be Funny Anymore” opens the debut record by Richmond, Virginia, songwriter Lucy Dacus. It’s a song about how we assign people, particularly women, one role and keep them locked there. She tries on different hats (the “cute one,” the “frontman of the band”), while calling up all the drawbacks of being funny (hurting people’s feelings, winding up the butt of jokes yourself). The song is also about how we all hide fear of the future and personal insecurity behind humor. It’s catchy, pointed, and — yes — funny. Dacus is a formidable songwriting talent, easily conjuring up melodies and painting everything from character studies to meditations on love at first sight with evocative imagery — all amid immaculately produced, guitar-driven indie rock. She returns to the theme of humor near the abum’s end with “Map on a Wall,” a seven-minute opus that starts with, “Please don’t make fun of me, with my crooked smile and my crowded teeth,” then cycling through statements of self-empowerment (“I made up my mind to live happily”), and finally landing back on the original theme, here presented as “Please don’t make fun of me, this smile happens genuinely.” The song is about wanderlust, but with the call to live life fully, she suggests that we maintain the empathy to see that others have
the same right. It’s nothing to joke about. — Robert Ker
ANOHNI Hopelessness (Rough Trade/Secretly Canadian)
From her collaborations with Lou Reed and Björk to her divine disco-infused vocals with Hercules and Love Affair, Anohni has used her feminine falsetto to belt out radiant songs. She is more popularly known as Antony Hegarty, of the band Antony and the Johnsons, but the transgender singer has since transitioned to the moniker Anohni. Alongside her personal transformation, she has considerably revamped her musical output. With this new project, made in collaboration with whiz-kid British dance producer Hudson Mohawke, she has created a series of dance thumpers that openly address drone warfare, climate change, and the surveillance state. Balancing pop with weighty issues is usually a surefire way to fail at both endeavors. But the lead single, “Drone Bomb Me” effectively marshals Anohni’s plaintive vocals to craft a song where electronic squelches and radiant piano synths play a happy foil to a dissonant chorus, “Drone bomb me/Blow me from the mountains/And into the sea.” It really shouldn’t work, but Anohni knows how to traffic in deliveries so raw and wilting that she can locate the shared emotional vulnerability in any subject. Against a deep volley of overlapping drum samples on “Obama,” she manages to assemble a dance-floor-ready cut that recreates the rise and fall of hope in an unprecedented presidency. In “4 Degrees,” the singer catalogs, by name, an arc full of animals that will be decimated by global warming. Avoiding the pitfalls of pretension and exploitative sadness, Anohni has pulled off an unlikely, M.I.A.-like feat of performing politics on the dance floor. — Casey Sanchez