Review: Dana Why pushes musical boundaries with ‘The Lyre’

Life is all about burnt endings. Whether that’s death, heartbreak, or snapping a period of your life in two, there’s no beginning without an end. And it’s tragically cyclical. What grows frail and delicate blooms into vibrancy before fading and returning to the earth again. That seems to play at the core of Dana Why‘s debut album, The Lyre, on which the popsmith excavates three very specific ends to craft his work: a breakup, a job loss, and a move to New Jersey. Sonics swerve and crash into the eardrums, tickling the nerve ends until the shock permeates every recess of your being. It’s an experience, an epoch, a mind-melting soundscape littered with regrets and heartache and suffering. But so is the human experience.

Dana Yurcisin, the mastermind behind Dana Why, drinks in the moment. His music oftentimes feels expansive while managing to tug your ear closer. There’s an intimacy that throbs and mutates across the 15-stack record, whisking you away into the galaxy as he pokes holes in the stars. He immortalizes the work through burnishing synths, drums, and guitar over a washboard, and his voice is the conduit by which he explores the meanings of life and the sadness that comes with simply existing. “Heaven is a Highway: Black Coffee,” best described as an eight-minute epic poem, transmits the fluttering of wind on an open-road excursion along the eastern seaboard. The salt air sprinkles into the production, as though you’re experiencing what he’s felt skittering on his skin. It’s those long, winding trips from Maine to New Jersey that kept him plugged into his own mental wanderings, able to remain in a more grounded state of being.

The Lyre straps together plush melodies against an ever-moving, transitory backdrop. There’s no pinning it to the wall and declaring what genre it rightfully nestles within; and that’s the marvel of the world Yurcisin has sculpted. The weed-laden “Western Cemetery” rattles with electric guitars that puncture the back of the skull, before vocal distortion and wind chimes soothe the membrane and cast a dizzying spell. Where “Night, Be Kind” shatters with screamo intoxication, spliced with almost lullaby-like sections, “Hand Sanitizer” oscillates between prickly meditation and punk-fused pop psychedelia. Yurcisin writhes in such contrasts to mimic the very nature of his creative muse, always on the run from the heartache screeching in his chest. “You used to love me / But now I’m nothing / And that’s something,” he observes with “Jersey Devil,” a saxophone-bound strip of hot tar that parallels his tango with anger and reclaiming himself.

With most songs clocking in over five minutes, The Lyre benefits greatly from such journeying into the soul. It’s a tall ask to sit through six- and eight-minute songs, but Yurcisin makes it well worth the while. His musings are connective tissues and the blood pumping through veins in all of us. It’s deeply personal and universal in the same breath. And you can’t help but marvel at what he’s accomplished. It’s just a delight.

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