(catching up on some old reviews)
Lucy Dacus emerged last year from a fertile songwriting scene in Richmond, Virginia, to almost immediate rapturous acclaim. The first thing I heard from her debut record No Burden was “Strange Torpedoes,” and then the nervously energetic “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore” appeared on some MP3 blogs and podcasts, and I was intrigued. She has been touring incessantly on the East Coast and elsewhere, and I missed her in past swings though DC, but ended up being offered a free ticket to her appearance at DC9 on June 1st— and I suspect it is the last time she’ll be playing such a small venue, as her debut album was picked up by Merge for re-release. DC9 is one of my favorite small venues, but it fills up quickly, and the place was packed.
Dacus is a young woman, with a shy smile, whose seeming reticence disappears when she inhabits her songs. One tends to ascribe a degree of autobiography to first-person singer-songwriters, which may be unfair, but the specificity of some of her references make many of the songs appear unflinchingly personal.
She is absolutely Southern, wearing a Virginia is for Lovers t-shirt in the show I saw, but on many of the songs there is not a specific country influence — “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny” and “Troublemaker Döppleganger” are dryly sung indie rock with crunching electric guitars. Dacus sings with surprising octave shifts, shifting out of a limpid alto to keening high notes. “Strange Torpedoes” is fascinating first for the rising and falling wordless chorus of “oh-ohs” and propulsive rhythms, but it actually offers a devastating portrayal of someone succumbing to addiction, along the lines of Lucinda Williams’ “Drunken Angel.” “Troublemaker” looks askance at the cautionary tale of a woman, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, whose rise and possible downfall offers a strange allure.
Daddy told you to stay indoors
and I can understand how a girl gets bored-
too old to play and too young to mess around.
She was a victim of the same disease
that’s roaming the streets and bites when it please
and makes us wanna live forever or die in infamy
At DC9 Dacus played with a small band, while she switched from electric to acoustic guitar on the ballads, like “Green Eyes, Red Face.” While Dacus gets a lot of deserved attention for her lyrics, simpler structures like the acoustic pieces demonstrate the fundamental craft of her songwriting — as well as the riveting way she can inhabit a character through a startling image or turn of phrase. There is the recurring line, “Without you I am surely the last of my kind,” shared among several of the songs on No Burden, and she carries more weight in those simple words than some of the dizzying flows of words in some of her wordier tracks.
Dacus and bandmate Hayden Arp had covered “I Would Die 4 U” — a song they had recorded almost a year ago for a friend’s wedding — which took unexpected resonance on Prince’s death. They did a simply harmonized version at DC9 that takes out some of the fussiness from the online version. It was raw, simple, and heartfelt.
Opening for Dacus and her band at DC9 were Gracie and Rachel, a duo (sisters? who knows, this isn’t journalism) performing sweetly intimate piano art-pop with some violin and guitar flourishes.
