In “Not Strong Enough” the pumping, echoing production summons the new wave 1980s; one verse mentions singing the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” The trio describes a shaky relationship, with a nod to a Sheryl Crow song: “I am not strong enough to be your man/I lied, I am, just lowering your expectations.” But the music is sure of itself, with insistent drums, steady-strummed guitars and countermelodies from the bass, and it carries boygenius toward a theological refrain: “Always an angel, never a god.”
In both sonics and words, boygenius looks back to something that has changed — for the worse — between the analog and digital eras. Let’s call it quantifiability: the reduction of lived experience to coldly impersonal numbers. Offline, there’s still a lingering humanity in the untabulated, non-replicable, just plain messy circumstances of everyday physicality and spiritual connection — something that music can still capture, even when it’s played back from a computer. And boygenius knows it’s still accessible.
The songs on “The Record” make ambiguity and ambivalence sound sensible, even intimate. “Emily I’m Sorry” features Bridgers, her voice breathy and anxiously apologetic, as the track morphs from low acoustic strumming to pulsating, programmed, flipped-backward sounds. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” Bridgers sings, “But I know what I want.”
The album’s finale, “Letter to an Old Poet,” also has Bridgers up front. It places plain piano chords in an electronic limbo, joined by swooping strings, as the singer tries to break away from someone she loves who’s charismatic but evil. “You make me feel like an equal,” she sings, “but I’m better than you and you should know that by now.” The song grapples, craftily and intensely, with the distance between passion and logic, between feelings and measurements. Three indie-rock songwriters may not be able to bridge that separation, but they’re trying.
boygenius
”The Record”
(boygenius/Interscope)
