Song of the Week: Gold Rush
You've got something sweeter than liquid gold
This is what I know about Lucius:
-committed, visionary, cool visual concept (the two lead singers, who are not even related1, look and dress like twins, down to their clothes & hairdos).
-fantastic dual singing2, courtesy of two vocal powerhouses who seem3 just fine pooling their powers for good, who seem united right down (back to the first bullet) to the hairstyles, makeup, and fashion sense.
-a cool, not particularly easily-categorized brand of music-making. What’s the genre? Indie pop? What does that even mean? That they make catchy, singable music that’ll never get on the radio? That you can dance to it, but only independently? I don’t know, but, whatever it is, it’s not a quick and easy box you put them in.
-at least one utterly fantastic song I love per album4….which is more than I can say for even some of my pantheon-favorites.
-their new self-titled album came out last Friday, May 2. All the songs they’d trickled out over the past few months, in the modern mode of drip-by-drip album rollouts, have been excellent, at a minimum, often breaking well into AMAZING. My two personal favorites have been “Impressions” (which features Paul catnip artist Madison Cunningham and a standout chorus melody) and our song of the week, “Gold Rush.”
This is what I love about “Gold Rush”:
-amazing weird intro with one stabby guitar having a back-and-forth conversation with two squirrelly guitars. It’s metrically ambiguous, the song sort of obscuring (or delaying the reveal of) where the downbeat is5. The drums thump in and help orient the listener, but even then it’s not particularly indicative of where the song is going, which is…
-a head-bobbing groove by the bass guitar and drums in the verse, with the patently doubled, unison Lucius vocals dancing on top, only splitting into harmony right as the song bleeds into…
-a really patient pre chorus with the vocals splitting—one holding the top note while the other descends patiently, down one note then the next then the next, on “leeeeeavvve”—that takes its time as a distortion swells, believing in the payoff of the chorus enough to really milk the wait, and then everything drops out for a breath before…
-yep, a melodically hooky-as-all-get-out chorus where Lucius splits the vocal into magical harmony and, just to make sure it still has some edge, a little dissonance in the guitar part
-and the weird intro comes back! I love that it could’ve been just some weirdo way into the song and then abandoned, but they commit, like true pop practitioners. And then we’re back into…
-a shorter second verse. One of my favorite tricks of the trade, where you shorten the distance to the (pun intended) sugar6/chorus. Somehow, even when I see it coming, it still works. What I didn’t see coming after the chorus, though, was…
-A MILDLY PSYCHEDELIC INTERLUDE, two overdriven trembly guitars going back and forth7 that builds even more tension and distorted feedback before another drop out and….
-back into the chorus! You’ve already heard the hooky-as-all-get-out-itude of it all, so this time, check out what’s happening underneath: that squonky fuzzy bass guitar part and squonky squelchy guitar parts….so good.
-the outro cracks me up because the guitar parts are, by miles, the most “standard” sounding guitar parts of the whole song. Simple clean arpeggios and chords. I would bet my Banjo Signed By The Lesser Members Of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band8 that the guitar part we hear at the end was the guitar part that they initially started writing the song with. It sounds so intuitive, like the thing your hands would do when you sat down at the guitar. That’s not a knock; it’s just more natural sounding. And then they said “what if we tried something else” and came up with the other parts. I guarantee it. Nobody’s taking my Banjo Signed By The Lesser Members Of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Jess Wolfe & Holly Laessig met in 2005 at the Berklee School of Music. I can only assume they showed up to class in the same outfit with the same haircut and went from there.
So good, in fact, that they’ve been tapped to sing backup for all kinds of artists. I saw them live once, singing harmony with Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame), but you’re just as likely to hear them singing with list of no-namers like:
-Ringo Starr
-The Killers
-Brandi Carlile
-The War On Drugs
-Nathaniel Ratliff & The Night Sweats
-Sheryl Crow
-Bleachers
-Black Pumas
-T-Bone Burnett (one of my favorite T-Bone Burnett songs)
-Lukas Nelson
-Ingrid Michaelson
-Andrew Bird
-Jesca Hoop
-Bahamas
-Kurt Vile
-Dawes
-Grace Potter
-Margo Price
-Brandy Clark
-Yo Gabba Gabba
-San Fermin
-Cold Water Kids
-Manchester Orchestra
-Portugal The Man
-SYML
-Joni Mitchell
-Ozzy Osbourne
-Harry Styles
-John Legend
-Tweedy (including one of the best Tweedy tunes)
-The Rentals
what a range of artists…
Please. Nobody send me stories of backstage shouting matches. When somebody told me that Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt weren’t showing up to the studio everyday with potluck dishes and friendship bracelets they’d made overnight, I was crestfallen.
From 2013’s Wildewoman: either the title track or “Turn It Around”
From 2016’s Good Grief: “Born Again Teen”, but you could talk me into the Secret Sisters-esque “Dusty Trials” or opening track “Madness”
I didn’t listen to 2018’s Nudes a lot, but I did love their song “Defibrillation” with The Barr Brothers in the same year. And there’s something charming about the lo-fi, late-night-pub quality of “Goodnight, Irene” with Roger Waters.
From 2022’s Second Nature, “Next To Normal” has some groovy disco Midnite Vultures vibes going. This song would have ruled Studio 54 in the 70s.
I’ve already written about my love for Season 11 of the Dissect podcast. But host Cole Cuchna explores how Radiohead plays with intentional rhythmic ambiguity in some of their intros. He goes into far more detail than my very surface analysis.
The fun thing about convention is breaking it. Sometimes I’ll make the next verse even longer, like a tease. A lot of great music is about toying with expectation.
JUST LIKE THE INTRO BUT NOT JUST LIKE THE INTRO! That’s pop science for you.
I do, in fact, own a banjo signed by people like John McEuen (but not main dude Jeff Hanna, who apparently wasn’t in the mood) who are in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a band I have listened to exactly once: when they played our corporate function. I knew about their record Will The Circle Be Unbroken but had never listened. Imagine my surprise when a bunch of the 20somethings at my company knew all the words to “Fishin’ In The Dark.” Anyway, our amazing event coordinator got some of the dudes to sign a banjo, which she gave to me as a thank you for helping make the event what it was. Honestly I should’ve given her a banjo…
My favorite Lucius tune is The Man I’ll Never Find. SO GOOD.