Lucius – Second Nature: Like Dancing with a Broken Heart

Artist: Lucius
Album: Second Nature
Year: 2022
Grade: B-

In Brief: Lucius seems to occupy a weird space somewhere between rock band, pop group, and singer/songwriter duo. There’s no denying that Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig are a dynamic vocal pair who can lay the beautiful melodrama on quite thick, but as time has gone by, the arrangements on their records seem to have become more economical and synthetic. The music on this record is often danceable and catchy, and a few of the slower ballads are quite arresting, but the songwriting isn’t quite hitting me as hard as it did on their first two records, which is bothersome considering how much grief and anxiety these new songs are trying to encapsulate.

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Who exactly is Lucius, anyway?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself as I listen to the Brooklyn indie pop outfit’s third studio album, Second Nature, which came out this spring. This is an album that has been a long time coming for Lucius, finally closing a six-year gap after their last album, 2016’s Good Grief. In the mid-2010s when their first two albums came out, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what Lucius was all about – they were a band fronted by two women, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, who both sang and played keyboards, and had sort of an eerie twin dynamic going on, where they would dress alike an mimic each other’s mannerisms and movements on stage, even though in real life they’re not related. When they first got my attention on their 2013 debut Wildewoman, they had a full-bodied indie rock sound with booming percussion, massive vocal hooks, and enough twists and turns in the instrumentation to invite occasional comparisons to indie stalwarts like Arcade Fire, if they were fronted by someone like the Haim sisters. That album was messy, but it was vibrant – easily one of my favorites of the decade. When Good Grief came along in 2016, it was still boisterous but more electronic elements had crept into their sound, sort of working a bit of 80s and early 90s pop into a style that already showed off shades of influence ranging as far back as the 60s and 70s. It was definitely an intoxicating mixture, and I ultimately ranked that album almost as highly as Wildewoman, with it narrowly missing out on my Top 100 at the end of the decade. Lucius took a bit of a detour in 2018, releasing an acoustic album Nudes that reimagined a few of their earlier album tracks as well as a few non-album singles and a brand new track or two (including the absolutely stunning opener “Woman”), but it wasn’t a new studio LP in the strict sense, serving as more of a compilation providing an alternate outlook on their career up to that point. The wait from there until 2022 for a proper third album seems like it’s been an eternity.

In the meantime, something unusual happened to Lucius, or at least it started happening more often than I had previously noticed it – they started showing up as backing vocalists for damn near everyone – they’ve sung on tracks by Jesca Hoop, Grace Potter, John Legend, Roger Waters, Harry Styles… the list of collaborations on their Wikipedia page is truly staggering. (And there’s precedent for this going back several years – I only recently got into the supergroup San Fermin and learned that the Jess and Holly had been the primary female vocalists on their first album back in 2013.) Of course, when I say that “Lucius” was featured on tracks by these artists, I really mean that Jess and Holly’s vocals were featured – I have no idea whether the backing band who usually accompanies them on their own record, made up of guitarist Peter Lalish and drummer Dan Molad, actually participated. They’ve been members of Lucius since the very beginning, but nowadays when people talk about Lucius, it seems more like they’re thought of as a vocal duo. Their powerhouse vocals are certainly the band’s biggest draw, but the fact that they front an actual band, instead of just a series of hired-gun day players from one album and tour to the next, is something that I felt gave them a pretty strong identity right from the get-go, setting them apart from some of their twee pop peers. There came a point where the novelty of hearing these two vocalists pop up on a variety of records across different genres went from a fun discovery to a nagging distraction, making me wonder when the heck Lucius was gonna get around to making more music of their own. Whether being in high demand as featured vocalists on other people’s records was the thing slowing them down, or whether that third album was just going through a lot of growing pains, I’m still not sure – I’ve read that they were working on something a lot more complex and conceptual as a follow-up to Good Grief, and it was ultimately abandoned, but I don’t know if any of that material was reworked for Second Nature or whether they started from scratch.

What I do know is that Second Nature, a record which the early days of Covid lockdown planted the creative seeds for, was designed to be a cathartic, danceable record that put down on paper what the band was feeling during these past two very stressful years, without having to overthink it. A lot of these new songs seem to depict the struggle to remain upbeat and positive when you’re reeling from sad and devastating events. There are some ways in which its DNA is similar to Good Grief, a record that also found clever ways to disguise its more depressing ruminations with danceable rhythms and earworm-y vocal hooks. There are a few tracks on Second Nature that sport funk and disco influences, almost as if the group is finding refuge from the unbearable stress of the modern era by revisiting some of their more light-hearted musical influences from yesteryear. (The move away from more organic and folksy sounds is honestly a bit surprising, given the presence of Dave Cobb and Brandi Carlisle behind the boards, both of them being more country/Americana-leaning artists.) At the same time, I can’t help but feel like the identity of Lucius as a band has been diminished here – the ballads that focus almost exclusively on those huge twin vocals seem to be more prominent on this record, and even the more upbeat material seems to be less “wall of sound” in nature than some of their old stuff. It’s taking longer for the hooks to really grab me and the lyrics to really hit home for me on this one – and that’s not to say that the songwriting is superficial or the band was on autopilot when they recorded it. It’s more that Second Nature seems to downplay some of Lucius’s quirks in favor of a more streamlined, get to the point, easily digestible pop album experience. I like most of these songs, but the experience isn’t anywhere near as immersive as it was when I first fell in love with Wildewoman all those years ago.

What does ring true throughout this record, though – and what has really been a constant for Lucius all these years – is the deep friendship between its two frontwomen. Living through the fear and isolation of the pandemic, combined with Jess Wolfe going through a divorce (the split seems to have been amicable, but it’s notable that her ex-husband, the aforementioned Dan Molad, is still in the band, so apparently they narrowly avoided a Fleetwood Mac sort of situation), gave the duo a lot of meaty things to write about, though I don’t feel like the results are quite as gripping as some of the more forlorn songs of lost love and loneliness and mental trauma on their last two records. (There are also a couple of drug metaphors in a few of the lyrics that make me raise an eyebrow – not in a judgy way, just in a “I don’t think this analogy works as well as you think it does” sort of way.) Perhaps it’s deliberate that Second Nature shies away from having a huge conceptual arc – it’s one of those records that feels more like a collection of singles with the occasional experimental bit or slow-burning B-side that a pop group making their debut to the world at large would put together simply to show off their range. The record ultimately winds down still in a bit of a somber place, not really coming to the sort of cathartic and satisfying conclusion that the anthemic “How Loud Your Heart Gets” did on Wildewoman or the soothing folk ballad “Dusty Trails” did on Good Grief. There’s some good stuff here, but I’ve still got the nagging feeling that Lucius, without all the interruptions and distractions that happened over the past six years, probably could have put out something more cohesive and gut-wrenching.

INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:

1. Second Nature
The leaner sound that Lucius is sporting on this album is evident right away on the title track, which actually does a really good job of being upbeat and catchy despite having fewer elements in the mix than the Lucius of old. The bass and the disco-inspired guitar licks stand out immediately, with the drums and keyboards coming in later, their cheery demeanor serving as a deliberate contrast to the imploding romance described in the lyrics. This one seems to be about one of those relationships that, try as you might to put your best foot forward and love the person like you did when you were younger and you first fell in love, you only end up wounding each other. It’s like something instinctual causes you to blow things up even when you’re trying to keep the peace. Something like that. It’s an interesting window into the divorce that apparently fueled some of the songwriting for this album, and a good summary of the overall premise of “danceable songs about personal tragedy” that they seem to be going for. This one took a couple spins to appreciate, but now I can’t get it out of my head. If you’re going to name your record after one of its songs, then you darn well better nail it on the title track, and Lucius definitely passes that test here.
Grade: A

2. Next to Normal
When this track was released as the first single from the new album, and the first truly new music we’d heard from Lucius in four years that wasn’t a cover, an acoustic remake, or them guesting on someone else’s song, I went pretty quickly from excitement to extreme skepticism. It was mostly because I got hung up on a rather goofy lyric in an otherwise very relatable song about finding a bit of normalcy in a cherished relationship amidst all the chaos and trauma that the 2020s have put us through thus far. The lyric in question was “I feel immortal, I’m high without the paranoia.” Songs that compare someone’s love to a drug are nothing new; it’s a trope I’m a bit tired of, but I don’t really raise an eyebrow at it any more. But the mention of paranoia kind of took me out of the moment, like it could have only been written by someone who had been high for real and knew what that paranoia felt like. Look, no judgment intended here – how you choose to relax in your spare time is your own business, and it’s perfectly legal in many jurisdictions now. I don’t get why it’s relaxing if said paranoia is such a common side effect, but whatever, it’s just not my thing, so I don’t expect to get it. I don’t want that to take away too much from an otherwise delightful song full of fuzzed-out guitars and a “walking” bass line that reminds me a bit of The Bee Gees – like the title track, it is genuinely catchy. The group lets their quirky side show a bit more here, especially with the campy “whoooo!”s that lead into the chorus. Ultimately, I think the songwriting here is pretty good, too – there’s nothing quite as special as finding that one person you can truly be yourself around, who won’t judge you or make you feel guilty for unloading your all your worries and fears on them. Like a great number of their songs, It’s written in an ambiguous enough way that it could be about a romantic relationship or it could be about the sisterly bond between the two frontwomen. It’s a good song – just one with a single glaring distraction that I haven’t quite gotten over.
Grade: B

3. 24
The sudden shift to “ballad mode” happens earlier here than I would have liked – I guess I had that same complaint about the twangy acoustic track “Go Home” on Wildewoman, which was in the unenviable position of following up that album’s highly catchy one-two punch of the title track and “Turn It Around”, but it grew on me eventually, and this one’s starting to as well. I can’t fault Lucius for showing off Jess and Holly’s vocal chemistry, since that is the band’s big draw, but as lovely as their acapella harmonizing is in the first verse, it seems to bring the pacing of the record to a complete dead stop. Instrumentally, this track is more synthetic in nature, revolving around the two frontwomen’s starry keyboards and a muted drum loop – the live drums come in a bit louder deeper in, which is when the real vocal histrionics come in, and these are all elements that I appreciate. The overall mix just seems a bit subdued, like this is something that belongs deeper in the track listing. One immediate strike against this song is it rather arbitrary use of the number 24 – sure, there are 24 hours in a day and that’s a logical way to describe the passage of time. But the other uses of that number don’t have the same resonance: “It’s been 24 days since I knew your name/24 hours ’til I get on this plane/And 24 words I could rearrange/To try and explain what I’m going through.” 24 days is almost a month, I guess, so that at least tells us there’s been some time to take stock of things after what sounds like a breakup or an unwanted separation. The 24 words never gets any further explanation – if those words occur within this song, it’s not at all obvious. Looking past that clunky first verse, this is actually a fairly straightforward song of regret and a feeling of being haunted by mistakes made in a relationship. It’s very much in line with a few past Lucius songs where they try to exorcise the demons left by a bad breakup or some sort of past trauma, and once the slow burn gets going, I think the two vocalists do a good job of making the drama believable. And I think it’s notable that the lyrics mention a person’s love feeling like a “heart attack” for the second time – this phrase cropped up in “Second Nature” as well. I just feel like the lyrics use an unnecessary numeric gimmick to try and hook us in the first verse, when that ultimately isn’t what the song is structured around.
Grade: B-

4. Heartbursts
Even though this is the second ballad in a row, this track actually proved to be the easiest one on the record for me to get into. It, too, is very keyboard-driven, combining a soft, almost ambient synth sound with some vintage keyboard tones that sound very much like an 80s pop singer trying to modernize by taking their cues from new wave bands. I’m into that sort of thing. It unfolds slowly and carefully, gradually immersing the listener in the neon glow of the arrangement, but without losing the heart of the performance along the way. For me it works because the music is very dreamy, and the lyrics are deliberately saying no to the idea of being trapped in a dream or an illusion, basically telling us that they’ve come to the sober realization that it’s time to say goodbye to a relationship, instead of burying their heads in the sand and pretending they can make it last forever. Ultimately all the heartache experienced as the relationship fell apart was worth it because, as the two ladies wail in the chorus, “Better give your heart than never give at all.” It’s an old adage that many love songs have explored, so it’s not like this is a new revelation, but it’s being sung by voices that have experienced it firsthand, which counts for a lot. While this is one of those songs that drags Lucius firmly into the “pop” world, to the point where I don’t even feel the need to use the word “indie” or some other qualifier, it’s also one of their best written and performed, so I guess what I’m saying is that even though the idea of Lucius as a band has been really sidelined on these last couple tracks, I don’t mind it if the results are as good as they are here.
Grade: A

5. Dance Around It
If you expected another upbeat dance/pop song here, then congratulations! You win the Captain Obvious Door Prize. Honestly, this album could have been titled Dance Around It and that might have been an even better fit than Second Nature, given that so many of its songs about relationship woes revolve around a couple’s hesitance to admit the truth to themselves. It’s a decent theme, and so far I appreciate how well Lucius has juxtaposed the glowy synths and upbeat rhythms with all the heartache. I can think back to a time when it struck me as unusual for Lucius to do straight-up, keyboard-driven dance-pop – the track “Almost Makes Me Wish for Rain” was a definite curveball on Good Grief, and now that song seems to fit them like a glove, so I guess that’s stylistic evolution for ya. My feelings about this track are much like my feelings about “Next to Normal” – good song, solid hook, spirited performance, but I get very distracted by an odd lyrical choice. In this case, it happens in the lead-up to the chorus, when Lucius is setting up a series of pseudo-rhymes with short “u”s in them, making sure we know what to expect next: “Sweep that under the rug/Got a whole lotta space but with nowhere to run/I just touch myself ’cause I don’t wanna f–.” I’m not censoring that. They censored it. They didn’t bleep it, so much as they just made the “f” sound and abruptly halted, leaving the listener to fill in the blank. So while it’s not an obvious “I decided to make this family-friendly by blanking out my curses at the last second” move like Ed Sheeran would make, it’s still a puzzling decision, considering how many pop artists nowadays just let the f-bombs fly, even on the songs expected to be big singles, and figure their remixers/editors will make whatever adjustments they need to for radio after the fact. It does fit the underlying narrative, which is about a couple that has grown so distant that they no longer seem to make time for intimacy or to talk through their problems, leading to the proverbial dance that the song is cheekily using a dance-pop style to describe. So points for creativity there – but they needed to either stand behind their decision to curse or else rewrite that line entirely. The other distraction here isn’t one that is noticeable when listening to the song, it’s the fact that both Sheryl Crow and producer Brandi Carlile are credited as featured artists here, and I honestly can’t tell where Lucius ends and they begin. Jess and Holly consistently fill whatever space they’re given to occupy as vocalists, so it seems unnecessary to throw another voice in there, let alone two, unless you’re going to give them a spotlight verse or use them as some sort of a counterpoint to the narrative. If I don’t even notice a guest vocal, then that guest vocal is unnecessary – and I honestly can’t think of a reason why you’d have that much star power at your disposal and squander it like that.
Grade: B

6. The Man I’ll Never Find
This song is just a bummer. Not that I’d expect it to be happy, given the overall theme of the album, but it just isn’t very interesting on a musical level, which makes the defeatist admission in its lyrics feel like a bit of a slog to unpack. The basic premise is, a woman’s slowly accepting that her partner’s never going to be the man of her dreams, much as she might try to force that square peg into a round hole. In the second verse, she cops to the fact that she’s not exactly his dream girl either. Fair’s fair, I guess. I think a lot of relationships build up resentment over time when the gap between expectations and reality starts to become more noticeable – plus people change with age, so in some circumstances it’s reasonable for two people to grow apart. The bummer part of it isn’t just the realization that he’s not the one for her – it’s the desperate confession that she feels like she’ll never find the right man. That kind of pushes this song over the edge from believable melodrama into over-the-top angst. Regardless of the believability of the lyrics, none of the instruments being played are really helping to sell it. The harmony vocals are locked in and as on point as they always are, but the instrumentation is reduced to rather basic piano chords, muted bass and electric guitar, the dry thump of a basic drum beat… nobody gets to embellish it or open it up in any way. That’s a drastic change for a band that, up to this point, has generally been quite inventive with their arrangements, even on most of their slower, sparser material.
Grade: C

7. Promises
Hearing an acoustic guitar at the top of this song was honestly a surprise. For a minute or so, the breezy folk/rock vibe brings back happy memories of Wildewoman, and even when a keyboard sneaks in a bit later, the illusion isn’t shattered. I won’t pretend that the sound of this mid-tempo pop song is anywhere close to as huge as some of the deep cuts like “Until We Get There” and “Don’t Just Sit There” that I adored on Wildewoman, but it’s nice to get that vibe again. Lyrically, this could almost be a country song, with its depiction of a romantic encounter between two individuals who clearly don’t live together. She notes that the bed he sleeps in is empty, and urges him not to bother making promises he knows he can’t keep – the satisfaction they’re going to get out of this arrangement is temporary, and she figures they’re better off not fooling themselves. The twist – at least if I’m reading this correctly – is that the guy she’s sleeping with may well be her ex. In other words, it’s not a hookup between two people who barely know each other, it’s a fleeting attempt to kickstart the romance in a relationship that has already deteriorated to the point where the two sleep in separate beds (and probably separate houses). They throw that irresistible, easy-to-sing-along to pop chorus with its oh-so-satisfying rhymes in there, but deep down… yeah, this is a country song. No shame in that!
Grade: B

8. LSD
I straight-up cringed when I saw that there was actually a song called “LSD” on this record. Even assuming the best about a song with that title – that it was actually an acronym for something clever – it would still invite unfair comparisons to that infamous Beatles song that I’m sure everyone is gonna think of when “LSD” comes up as a song title. Turns out that it actually is an acronym – and that just ends up making the song worse, because it stands for “Love So Deep”. That’s right – the one moment on this record where we truly get a breather from all the heartache, and we get to explore the feeling of being truly head over heels, out of control, in love with someone, it’s wasted on this utterly campy and downright embarrassing drug metaphor. Is it even really much of a metaphor, aside from the acronym being thrown in there to be provocative? Honestly, not really. I at least believed that the marijuana reference in “Next to Normal” was written from first-hand experience, but according to this song, LSD must be a lot like marijuana, because apparently it makes you really hungry? At least they’ve correctly noted that it makes you hallucinate. But come on, if even I know that and I’ve never done a single drug (legal or otherwise) in my lifetime, they’re obviously not digging very deep here. I don’t know that I would want them to. This is just a dumb premise for a song, no matter how you slice it. It’s a shame, because they’ve got another decent dance-pop beat and a compelling vocal harmony to hang it on, so if you’re not paying attention to the lyrics, it actually goes down pretty smoothly. But seriously… LSD??!?!?! C’mon, Lucius, you’re better than this.
Grade: C-

9. Tears in Reverse
This might be the most lyrically enigmatic song on the record. I think the idea behind it might be some sort of healing, or effort to undo the emotional damage caused by the relationship that’s been unraveling in slow motion throughout this record. Perhaps the songwriter’s gotten to the point where she has no more tears left to cry, and the promise of rain, which will quench her thirst and bring with it the ability to cry tears (and I guess feel some sort of genuine emotion) again is seen as a good thing, more like they’re tears of relief than tears of pain. It sounds like this was written at a point where the failed romance was starting to come to a place of understanding and transform more into a friendship, giving them a different but more genuine way to love each other. But you could probably interpret this one a lot of different ways. Musically… it’s alright. It’s got a mid-tempo beat, and at first it seems to be dialing up the quirkiness factor with a bit of a talkbox effect on the guitar (or perhaps it’s a keyboard – it’s in that in-between zone where I genuinely can’t tell). But by the time it gets to the chorus, the vocals and some subtle synths underpinning them are really the main driving factors. It’s one of those deep cuts that I don’t really think about much when I don’t have the album on, sort of like “Better Look Back”, the penultimate track from Good Grief.
Grade: B-

10. White Lies
The album ends with an arresting ballad – easily one of Lucius’ best – that honestly feels like it should be the midpoint of the story. I don’t think Second Nature is strict with its concept, so it’s not necessarily a problem that its tales of relationship woe are apparently being told out of order. But this definitely feels like the sort of thing you’d close Side A of a record with, rather than the record as a whole. No big deal, it’s a showstopper and I’m sure it would make a stunning live finale, given the opportunity it gives Jess and Holly to hit some gut-punching high notes as a sparse arrangement gradually works its way to a convincing climax. This one seems to navigate around the problems that plagued “24” and “The Man I’ll Never Find”, in that it starts off small and simple, with the band mostly out of the way to focus on the two vocalists, but it brings in the piano and drums in a way that feels like they’re contributing to the melody and the emotional arc of the song, and not just there to keep time. Much like “Promises”, this song is concerned with the things two lovers say to each other but don’t really mean – but at this point in the story, they still seem willing to delude themselves into believing they can make it work. This is why “Promises”, and arguably even “Dance Around It”, could work as later chapters in this story. As an ending, this certainly does a good job of leaving the listener devastated while also making some of the red flags in the relationship obvious, so I’m guessing they chose to go out on this note because a track like “Tears in Reverse” or even “LSD” that would have marked a turning point in our protagonist’s search for happiness wouldn’t have been as satisfying of a finale, musically speaking.
Grade: A-

WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Second Nature $1.75
Next to Normal $1
24 $.75
Heartbursts $1.75
Dance Around It $1
The Man I’ll Never Find $.25
Promises $1
LSD $0
Tears in Reverse $.75
White Lies $1.50
TOTAL: $9.75

BAND MEMBERS:
Jess Wolfe: Lead vocals, synthesizers
Holly Laessig: Lead vocals, keyboards
Dan Molad: Drums, backing vocals
Peter Lalish: Guitars, backing vocals

LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:

MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://ilovelucius.com/
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