ALBUM REVIEW: The Rest - Boygenius
The Rest - Boygenius
Coming in the wake of one of the year’s biggest releases in the form of The Record, the boys have been busy, touring non-stop since the album’s release. Despite this, Boygenius named their EP of B-sides The Rest, a four track EP made up of The Rest of the songs that weren’t included on The Record. The EP is largely a return to their more indie-folk roots for the supergroup rather than their more indie-rock sound that dominated The Record. But these tracks have a surprising cohesion, a thematic unity around space, and are far from throwaways.
The album begins with “Black Hole,” a short track starting out with a droning guitar that eventually is replaced by a droning bass as the guitar melody picks up. Baker sings wistfully about smoking cigarettes in a rainstorm while looking at stars, describing them as being spat out by a black hole, rather than destroyed forever. An instrumental interlude including the ascension of the major scale portends the return of the drums and bassline. Phoebe and Lucy fill in the mix with a list of scattered thoughts before the song ends with the powerful couplet: “My thoughts, all noise, fake smile, decoys / Sometimes, I need to hear your voice.”
“Afraid of Heights” is a lyrical standout on the EP driven by Lucy Dacus about a friend pushing her to take risks in the name of faux-capriciousness. She packs a lot into a less-than-three minute song without making it feel either cramped or packed as she sings about not fitting into the aesthetics of radicality, as she’s “never rode a motorcycle” or “smoked a cigarette” and is afraid of heights. Thematically fitting, the song is based around a mellow acoustic rhythm guitar broken up by a slide guitar that comes in sporadically with a sound somehow reminiscent of the cosmos, combined with the harmonies on the chorus.
“Voyager” is a classic Phoebe Bridgers track navigating between a solipsistic sadness and a sort of cosmic loneliness with lines like “And I don't mean to make it all about me” after mentioning pre-apocalyptic temperatures outside. Where Dacus is zoomed in, Phoebe is zoomed out, delivering a pared down vocal performance on top of finger picked guitar and the other member’s soft countermelody that make it feel like it’s just Phoebe, the listener, and the universe. This distance is planetary, as Phoebe “feel[s] like a man on the moon,” seeing the Earth as a pale blue dot, just like the Voyager probe the song is named after.
The final track is the standout of the bunch: “Powers,” another Julien-led track that starts out with what seems might lead to a heavy drop before going quiet, all the while Baker’s singing and the constant eighth-note guitar strums build tension, as if on the verge of something. That tension is resolved in the third verse, as all three sing together for the only time on the EP, comparing the “light at the end of the tunnel” to the light in the Hadron Collider, scattered, disparate, daily. In unison, the trio sings “The force of our impact, the fission / The hum of our contact, the sound of our collisions,” a nod to the way our life experiences are built day by day, construction in the form of a gentle hum rather than with the superpowers mentioned in the song’s beginning, while also acknowledging the force of life’s collisions – whether for construction or destruction. After that declarative, mic-drop statement, amid the guitars fading out – horns play a melody that’s not quite celebratory, not quite mourning. While the songs on The Rest don't match the consistent heights of The Record, moments like these prove that they’re definitely the same band, and how even in times of rest the hum of our contact sings loudly.
- DJ Gavroche AKA Jonathan Hayden
RIYL: Big Thief, Leith Ross, Snail Mail
Recommended Tracks: "Powers," "Voyagers," Pure Smile Snake Venom
FCC: Explicit