Lucius’s Wildewoman is a Comeback for the Ages
Ten years ago, a feeble reviewer in the UK took a dim view of Lucius’s debut album Wildewoman: “Unconvincing” said the Guardian. More than a decade later, as the band releases a fully re-recorded version of the groundbreaking album, it’s rather the review that failed to persuade. Wildewoman has become practically talismanic. Not only the starting gun for the band’s long-distance run toward global stardom and industry accolades, but the album has also become a prototype for songwriting that harmonizes two seemingly impossible progressions: the stretching of genre boundaries that keeps a listener guessing and the illusory charm that makes one tap a foot, shout a chorus, and try shamelessly to harmonize.
About those harmonies. Wildewoman’s release was a catapult for the band’s frontwomen Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, whose voices imbricate in ways impossible to imitate. Their mysterious coalescence has contributed to the sonic atmosphere of dozens of the most notable acts in the world, each magnetized not only by the duo’s mystical harmonics, but by the polymathic musicality on display in Wildewoman. Find another pair equally at home with Ozzy Osbourne and Brandi Carlile, who can blend as naturally with the esoteria of Roger Waters and the stadium hooks of The Killers.
Later, Lucius albums were themselves derivations of the themes of their debut. The genre limit-testing continued in the band’s electric eclecticism, bounding from indie folk to synth-pop to retro-punk to downright disco—and always with a gymnast’s nonchalance. Less attentive reviewers have skewered this migratory tendency as a challenge of identity. For those who lean in closer, the refusal of boundaries is clearly a feature, not a bug. The band’s too kind to leave you untethered anyway: there is always the thread of lush atmospherics, the complete world-building made possible when emotive lyricism meets immersive soundscape. And beneath all that aural magnificence runs the relentless, resonant tropes, rendered across a dance of declaratives, narratives, and imperatives: heartbreak and hope, distance and doubt, recapture and regret, vulnerability, and verve.
From their early 2010s basement shows in Brooklyn, where this reviewer first encountered Lucius, it was apparent that their tradecraft exceeded the matching garments and symmetrical bobs and eyebrow-raising cover art. Their business remains alchemy, blending intimate and inscrutable to create inimitable. They were then, and are now, both a friend within reach and a spirit beyond comprehension. We are lured in with a whisper to be awakened by a scream. Their startlingly courageous release of Wildewoman is in keeping with the original’s promise to find another way back home.
