Everybody sparkled Thursday night at Mass MoCA, where Lucius opened their first tour since 2019 with a vibrant performance that drew heavily on songs from their new album, “Second Nature.”
Some of that sparkling was literal: more than a few people in the audience wore outfits incorporating sequins, and some went all-out by draping themselves in strands of lights and even dressing up to resemble Jess Wolfe or Holly Laessig, the Lucius singers who adhere to a highly stylized matching aesthetic. Even those who weren’t dressed in something reflective got to absorb the band’s colorful performance, which emphasized the beat.
Photo by Eric R. Danton
“Second Nature,” the band’s first full-length album since 2016, is made for the dance floor, and Lucius got bodies moving from the very start with the title track, a disco-laced jam that builds in power as it progresses. Backed by various combinations of drums, bass, keyboards and guitar, Laessig and Wolfe showed the range and strength of their voices: they can blow out the back wall as easily as they can sound like they’re murmuring in your ear. “The Man I’ll Never Find” featured both, starting mournful and quiet with tightly interlaced harmony vocals, and expanding into a widescreen soundscape as Laessig and Wolfe wrung every ounce of feeling out of the heartbreaking lyrics. (The rest of the band consists of Dan Molad on drums, Peter Lalish on guitar and keys, Solomon Dorsey on bass and Alex Pfender on guitar and keys.)
“Dance Around It,” by contrast, was a pedal-down banger all the way through. The band brought onstage three people from the audience, the consensus choices for most sparkly, to dance their way through the song, which surged through the Hunter Center on a pumping bassline and rock-solid beat like some kind of massive disco wave.
Lucius dipped into their back catalog, too, with a tight version of “Tempest” from their 2013 LP “Wildewoman,” which featured Laessig and Wolfe supplementing the rhythm on floor toms positioned in both corners at the front of the stage. Wolfe introduced “Dusty Trails,” from 2016’s “Good Grief,” by talking about how the meaning of the lyrics has changed over the years: where once the song was about missing home, now it’s about getting back on the road after being cooped up at home. Wolfe and Laessig sounded like they meant it as their voices rang out on the soulful climax of the tune. A song later, they urged the audience to help with the wordless vocals on “How Loud Your Heart Gets,” another of the band’s soaring ballads, also from “Wildewoman.”
After close to 90 minutes, the band ended their main set before returning for an encore.