This month, Gay City News reviews the latest albums by queer singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus and trans artist OHYUNG.
Lucy Dacus | “Forever Is a Feeling” | Geffen | March 28th
With her major label debut, “Forever Is a Feeling,” Lucy Dacus stands in a far different position than the one she occupied when her last solo album dropped in 2021. Since then, boygenius (the supergroup she formed with fellow queer artists Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker) have become big enough to sell out Madison Square Garden. Dacus recently sat in the front row for Paris Fashion Week. She’s likely to take the leap from indie stardom to actual celebrity. She now has the clout to get Irish rock star Hozier to drop by for a duet on “Bullseye.” Her music video “Ankles” comments on this. Shot in Paris, it portrays her as royalty: a queen who came to life out of a painting to walk the streets in hilariously billowing clothes. Never before would she be in a position to imagine herself being trailed by a servant.
Electric guitars are barely in evidence on “Forever Is a Feeling,” marking a big shift from Dacus’ rock-based work. The tone is set by “Calliope Prelude,” a violin-based instrumental. Contributing keyboards and strings, Phoenix Rousamanis is her main creative partner on the album. Dacus visits the world of baroque pop. Time spent in Europe has rubbed off on her. By now, Dacus and her boygenius bandmates must be heartily fed up with the “sad girl indie” label. “Forever Is a Feeling” expands her palette from the default of slow and wistful.
Although Dacus has always been open about being queer, she’s embracing her sexuality more directly. In her 2021 song “VBS,” she reminisced about an unhappy stay at a conservative Christian youth camp. Without mentioning the gender of the person with whom she had a furtive relationship there, one can surmise that they were likely a girl. But she’s now addressing love songs straight — so to speak — to women. The video for “Best Guess” shines the spotlight on mascs, whom it pictures dancing, playing poker, and arm-wrestling on a stark set. It captures the casual but intense pleasure of hanging out in a space where you’re accepted.
Taken on their own, the first few singles from “Forever Is a Feeling” seemed slightly compromised. Heard as part of a larger whole, they hit far harder amidst an album with a unified sound. The arrangement of “Limerence” is pretty funny, with Dacus singing “Roddy’s playing GTA/why is he so good at this game?/it should be cause for concern” over music suggesting a 19th-century European concert hall. Dacus has recently revealed she and Julien Baker are dating each other. Reading between the lines, most of “Forever Is a Feeling” muses on the excitement and nerves of a new relationship: “you are my best guess at the future…you were my best friend before you were my best guess” is sung with Baker in mind. On the title track’s verses, her voice, piano, and drums rush towards a more restrained chorus. The strength of her songwriting and the production support these feelings.
OHYUNG | “You Are Always On My Mind” | NNA Tapes/Phantom Limb | March 28th
Although they’re a highly skilled violinist, OHYUNG constructed the songs on “You Are Always On My Mind” from sample packs of strings. The album is burnished to a fine gloss, with its source material entering the uncanny valley. It repeats one sound: strings distorted by a thick gauze of phasing and reverb, over breakbeats. “You Are Always On My Mind” is dominated by a massive but indistinct drone.
OHYUNG has taken a long path to get here. Their 2018 album “Untitled (Chinese Man With Flame)” pursued leftfield hip-hop, tackling the politics of Asian-American experience. The breakbeats remain on “You Were Always On My Mind,” but rap is just one flavor of their style. (Here, they return to hip-hop on ‘5 strings {lake}’, which features rapper j. fisher.”) On the lengthy 2022 “Imagine Naked!,” their path went through ambient music. They’ve also composed the score for seven films, including work by queer directors Julio Torres and Shatara Michelle Ford.
They describe their album as a dialogue between their current self and their pre-transition incarnation. “dancing on the knife” pays tribute to the role of rave culture in accepting their gender. Yet as OHYUNG points out, “And now, under this new regime, I feel that the song takes on a new meaning: in an era where trans people are attacked every day, we’re forced to constantly dance on a knife’s edge.”
The most appealing song on “You Are Always On My Mind” is its opening title track. Yet this may be because it’s the first iteration of a sound the album keeps repeating. Against strings, drums boom and snap politely. OHYUNG’s vocals are often murky. They tend to repeat one line over and over, as if participating in a ritual. The same plug-in effects reappear song after song. The album’s palette is too limited to sustain 34 minutes. The spaciousness of the version of trap music presented on their first two albums is sorely missed.
Frustratingly, their visual presentation communicates more powerfully than this album. The video for “dancing on the softest knife” is a first-rate short film. Mimicking a video game, it presents a choose-your-adventure story, with animation, images of OHYUNG and phrases like “you have been living as a ghost of yourself” and “you set out anew, afresh, alive.” The ending celebrates their transition, following the words “character completed” with the menu prompt “go on a new adventure?” If only the music itself was as inventive!
