The Richmond-based artist collides big riffs, sweet melodies, and thick fuzz into crisp, cathartic songs about life’s uncertainties.
“Am I Joey? Am I John?/Maybe Dee Dee? Maybe Tom?” James Goodson wonders on “Choose Yr Ramone,” smuggling in the thesis statement of his debut album as Dazy: We may never quite figure out who we are, but the music of our youth will keep us grounded. It’s not just a namecheck—the Virginia musician channels the New York punk pioneers in his own artistry, reducing rock’n’roll to its starkest, swaggering pleasures. An average Dazy song strings together anthemic choruses, anticipatory verses, and life-giving electric fuzz, making a show of its own crumbling stitchwork. But Goodson isn’t following a formula so much as he’s reverse-engineering our need for the equation. OUTOFBODY cracks open the big riff rulebook to understand why we use it, uniting the comfort of hook-happy songcraft with the everyday stressors that compel us to hit play again and again. The result is a record of arena-sized power pop built from the small, mounting anxieties you wouldn’t think to express out loud, but might be the reason you’re screaming along to Dookie on the morning commute.
A lot of that deeper resonance is built into the project’s own origin. Where other people keep a diary, Goodson, an indie publicist by day, has long funneled his quotidian soul-searching into a private catalog of pop euphoria. The idea for Dazy came from years of overthinking the proper way to invite listeners in. It took some stockpiled drum machines, the foolhardy confidence to record guitars straight into pre-amp, and one pandemic-born impulse—release singles as fast as the microphone in Goodson’s spare bedroom could capture them—to coalesce that trepidation into a quick and noisy one-man-band aesthetic. He assembled these tracks for the 2021 compilation MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs, a dam-busting sugar rush that was an expression of his massive mental block. Instead of working through indecision, the content dump simply overpowered it.
Halfway through OUTOFBODY, Goodson puts words to that initial creative trepidation—one his debut triumphantly transcends: “I am always waiting on me/Consistently debating.” It’s noticeable what some judicious editing has done for Dazy’s music, even if it hasn’t actually changed much from last year. Aside from two tranquil cool-downs, the project’s default register remains a whirring buzzsaw attack. But whittling Goodson’s archives into 12 tracks affords each earworm crucial space to ensnare your mind without snagging their collective adrenaline. OUTOFBODY also finds ways to shift gears without slowing the tempo. Note how the Madchester-esque percussive outro to “Ladder” shuttles its energy directly into “AWTCMM?,” or the way that “Deadline” surges to life, pivoting off the dying synth fade-out that caps “Rollercoaster Ride.”
But what distinguishes Dazy’s debut isn’t just thoughtful pacing. From its first line—“Is that my voice leaving my own mouth?”—OUTOFBODY also offers a clear thematic frame: the rock album as therapeutic check-in. Throughout, Goodson sings about feeling “back and forth,” “up and down,” turned “inside out,” and shaken up. These feelings of dislocation aren’t physical, of course, but abstract, gesturing to the way adulthood scatters notions of identity. Perhaps that’s why OUTOFBODY is careful about giving away so little of Goodson. Befitting of all the distortion, these songs rarely present intelligible scenarios, simple emotions, or even other people, and instead work their uplifting hooks through inward-gazing lyricism. It’s a challenging, perhaps alienating twist on power pop—a rock form very nearly engineered from the need to construct a singalong chorus out of every possible human name.
But don’t accuse Goodson’s conceptual aims of obscuring his subgenre’s delights. If anything, they do the opposite. By offering its existential themes as fist-pumping fodder, OUTOFBODY makes an earnest plea for the cathartic utility of rock at its most shamelessly overt. By the time album closer “Gone” has warped its Oasis-style marching band psychedelia into a bittersweet lament for “nights that slip right past your eyes,” the import of Goodson’s approach is unmistakable. Music is all we have to hold onto—the only anchor we have against the “time relentless” he sings about on “Choose Yr Ramone.” Sometimes, the songs we love remain the same because you and I don’t.
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