Living With Records: April 2025 (Lucy Dacus, Bon Iver, Jensen McRae)
Album reviews for new records by Craig Finn and Zachary West & the Good Grief, plus a live review for Anxious' NYC headliner.
April was loaded with anxiety (and an Anxious live set). Sometimes I didn’t know if I’d write about the albums that I wanted to. I still did.
Jensen McRae – I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!
Everyone experiences heartbreak, and one of the universal feelings when going through that is that you’re never going to not experience the pain that you thought you did in those moments. While it seems like you’re going to live in perpetual heartache, eventually those moments do pass. The journey might be long and hard, but eventually, you’ll wake up one day and not believe how you used to be so sad. You may even manage to look back and feel happy when you look at some of those memories. That is the type of healing journey that Jensen McRae shows on her new album I Don’t Know How But They Found Me.
Throughout the record, McRae goes through the many emotions that you have when you’re going through a relationship that’s destined to fail, beginning with the ultra-catchy “I Can Change Him.” While the album is written with hindsight, McRae does a great job showing the bargaining and how you can become infatuated in a relationship. Songs like “Savannah” and “Daffodils” show how certain little acts of kindness can cut through a sea of red flags. It’s difficult for songs to not get phrases stuck in your mouth, even something as simple as "I’m gonna sleep in your navy bedsheets/Your roomate’s gonna hear me leave/In the morning when the novelty has worn off/Take my lace and my leather off.”
Throughout the record McRae also can nimbly adjust to meet the mood that the song needs over the indie pop folk sound that she’s developed. Whether she’s jumping into a high energy song like “Let Me Be Wrong” or a devastating ballad like “Tuesday,” she can excellently convey the range of emotions that you have when going through those heavy feelings. Her voice can bounce between a crisp and clean delivery to a rich and mournful depth. There are also a few moments where she gets to the edge of screaming, because sometimes, that’s what you need to do when you’re sorting out your feelings.
Ultimately, most of the record is written with the acceptance that the relationship didn’t work out. While you take inventory of everything that lead to the eventual split, there is acknowledgement that you will grow through it all, like when she sings “Loving me went from a high worth chasing to something lower than your expectations.” By the time that the last songs play, she’s reached a point that she’s moved past the heart ache. “Praying for Your Downfall” is about how she no longer wishes ill on her ex, even if she can see all those red flags. By the time that closing track “Massachusetts” plays, you can hear McRae smiling as she reminisces about the good times she had with that partner that broke her to pieces. Ultimately, the classes that we take in our partners throughout a relationship end up staying our memories, and you can decide if you want to feel sad when you hear the name of a beer or video game, but usually, you’ll probably remember a simpler time. You may even amuse yourself remembering how broken you felt in the relationship’s aftermath. Even though the wound is going to hurt, eventually, you’ll move on, and ultimately, that relationship will feel like it was worth the pain and heartbreak.
Zachary West & The Good Grief – Intrusive Thoughts
For the past few days, I’ve really connected with Zachary West and The Good Grief’s debut album Intrusive Thoughts. Released back in March, this album has been a bit of a slow burn for me. This is an alternative rock record that follows in punk rock traditions sort of like The Menzingers and The Gaslight Anthem, with enough soaring choruses to make them sound like they were lifted from the 2000s. At moments, if I closed my eyes enough, I could feel like I was in high school, listening to these songs on an iPod Classic rather than streaming them from the internet.
Most of the songs are pretty fast-paced straightforward rock songs in the tradition of bands like the Foo Fighters. West’s voice also has some grit to it, but it’s never so intense that I could imagine that any audience would be turned off. He has a voice that I’m sure would work very well if he was playing pop-punk, folk music, classic rock, or country.
Despite the fact that the sound can transport me back to a simpler time, I’ve found that as I pay attention to the lyrics, it does speak to a sense of existential panic that I’ve been feeling lately. Songs like “Wish You Ill” and “1 Foot, 6 Inches, 3 Inches, Very Close” both mourn very different losses with a lingering sense that there won’t be closure. Ultimately, a lot of Intrusive Thoughts deals with the unknown, and unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to the questions that you want answers to.
There’s also a continued wondering if there’s really any point to everything that we do. The album’s opening song laments about wanting things to get better, but feeling consistently stuck, which is certainly an emotion that’s resonated for me. “If my body’s truly a temple, why am I sifting through the rubble trying to find the strength to rebuild again?” West sings at one point, like he’s voicing a question that I’ve been asking myself for a year. As you hit a song like “Hiraeth,” there’s a fear about the anxiety continuing no matter how hard you try to combat it.
The album’s mission statement is probably best summed up on the late album track “Howell at the Moon” which features Wonder Years frontman Dan Campbell. West sings about getting dragged to the bottom when he’s dying to float. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re stuck fighting with ourselves, and I don’t know if we’ll ever truly feel like we don’t need to be in a constant battle with ourselves. Ultimately, it will always be a work in progress. Maybe we’ll figure a way out of this.
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