Lucy Dacus Brings the Drama

LUCY DAC US LEON BRIDGES GOES DEEPER

own terms, executing each one with dense, buttery vocals that slide right up next to her fervorous guitar noise. At a time when many of her twentysomething indie peers have veered into folk or Americana, Dacus chooses not to follow these trends, content to stay in the lonely lane of rock, cranking up the distortion as tumbleweeds blow by.

Home Video is her greatest work yet — a cohesive and poignant collection of tales from her teenage years in Richmond, Virginia. These stories are woven like a quilt, with several dark patches reminiscent of her hero Bruce Springsteen’s The River. “Being back here makes me hot in the face/Hot blood in my pulsing veins, ” she sings on the opener, “Hot and Heavy, ” as a nostalgic, palpable rush hits her: “Heavy memories weighing on my brain/Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents’ place. ”

Dacus navigates through early romances, contemplates religion, and fercely protects her friends — all with wide-eyed maturity and small-town realness. Although these are past recollections, she places them into the present, like retrieving moments from a diary and bravely re-enacting them in front of a crowd. It’s the kind of sharp storytelling songwriters spend a lifetime trying to accomplish, and yet Dacus — who is also a member of the acclaimed supergroup Boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker — is doing it at just 26 years old.

On the devastating ballad “Thumbs, ” Dacus breaks down a day in college, when she accompanied a friend to see their estranged father. She slowly unravels the encounter (“He ordered rum and coke/I can’t drink either anymore”) and begins to fantasize about murdering him. She takes it down a notch on “Christine, ” but maintains a passionate stance on friendship — especially when her friend’s settling for something less: “But if you get married, I’d object/Throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect, ” she admits.

Home Video culminates with the nearly eight-minute “Triple Dog Dare, ” in which she untangles queer love wrought with innocence and longing. It concludes an album that feels like a memoir of her early life, where each track resembles a delicate chapter. We’re lucky to get to live in her back pages.

The versatile Texas soul man’s third LP is his most ambitious and powerful work By JON DOLAN

LEON BRIDGES is a retro-minded artist who refuses to let the past stay settled. The Fort Worth, Texas, singer-guitarist broke out in 2015 with Coming Home, sounding like earlySixties soul but imagining an alternative Sixties, where soul men were free to proudly

Leon Bridges

Gold-Diggers Sound

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belt out a song called “Brown Skin Girl. ” 2018’s Good Thing brought on producer Ricky Reed, who’d worked with artists like Halsey and Maroon 5, for a sound that made the Seventies echo into the current moment.

Reed is on board for Bridges’ third LP, which is at once his most modern-feeling and his most exploratory, treating pop history as sonic Silly Putty and emotional glue.

“Born Again” opens with synths that can bring to mind vintage Stevie Wonder, distant kiting horns and a taut, skittering beat, as Bridges sings about the joy of con-

BREAKING

Joy Oladokun’s Realistic Redemption

ARIZONA singer-songwri ter Joy Oladokun grabbed listeners last year wi th her indictment of systemic racism, “I See America, ” proof that she has the potential to be the kind of star who delivers hard truths in the voice of a friend. On her major-label debut, she fuses country, gospel, pop, and soul, singing about her search for redemption on “Sunday” and our universal sense of depression on “Look Up. ” Her vocals can evoke Adele, and Maren

Morris joins her to sing about making a full house from a shi tty hand on “Bigger Man. ” The result is at once down-to-earth and upli fting, a voice that’ll make arenas feel like church. JON DOLAN stant rebirth and the solace of getting back to where you’re from — a perfect way to introduce a record that often feels like rootless roots music. Bridges calls this album psychedelic, not in the incense and peppermints sense, but in a feeling that any intimation of place is always in fux, at once earthy and trippy.

On “Motorbike, ” his roadhouse guitar ripples in the distance like a mirage, as he croons beautifully about his sweet ride as a metaphor for going far and feeling “whatever you like. ”

The music follows that cue. “Steam” is a gorgeous Eighties “Yacht&B” dreamscape. Ballads like “Why Don’t You Touch Me” and “Sho Nuf” feel more conventionally contemporary, but are delivered with a winning light touch, like a low-key John Legend.

Bridges is at his strongest when he strives to make plain his music’s social and political underpinnings. The obvious standout is “Sweeter, ” sung in the voice of a black man facing down an untimely death —

“Somebody should hand you a felony because you stole from me my chance to be, ” he sings with a plaintive urgency over an elegant track just strong enough to carry the weight of his worry. The song was released last year after the murder of George Floyd, and Bridges performed it at the Democratic National Convention.

Moments like that make the rest of the record feel like something deeper than a series of agile genre moves. It comes through in the way the title of the playalistic “Magnolias” evokes the South, making its sensual freedom feel more earned, a moment of transcendence as well as ease; and it’s in the way the warm, earthy “Don’t Worry” becomes an ofering of solace that is universal as well as personal. The result is music that subtly stretches our world.