There’s an intoxicating dissonance between the song’s internal heat and the sound’s steely distance, one that Big Thief might have successfully nurtured across the length of an entire album rather than this single track. “Flower of Blood,” with pirouettes of feedback from Lenker and Meek’s guitars, and a lyric that blurs violence and intimacy in classic Big Thief fashion, might have fit in on Two Hands if not for its production, with drums filtered to sound like sampled breakbeats playing over a massive PA. Though they seem determined to find a different way to organize themselves as a band with nearly every song, this conversational weaving of their instruments holds the album together at an intuitive level across its wild leaps. In the third verse of “Spud Infinity,” she rhymes “finish” with “knish” and laments human inability to kiss our own elbows, joints that spend their time “rubbing up against the edges of experience.” The song’s good-natured stroll from the dirt to the cosmos recalls John Prine or Michael Hurley, songwriters whose breezy humor has never previously worked its way into Big Thief’s music.Įven when the band is hamming it up, their ensemble playing is quietly spectacular, with drummer James Krivchenia rising and falling to meet Lenker’s turns of phrase, and guitarist Buck Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik scribbling countermelodies at the edges of her strumming. The settings seem to have a liberating effect on Lenker’s relationship to language, giving her access to a conversational new register where quotidian details reflect the big picture in miniature, and silliness is a route to profundity. Though Big Thief have taken many approaches to their music over the years, this sort of winking magpie postmodernism has not been one of them, so it’s strange to hear them leaning into a schtick.īut the longer you sit with “Spud Infinity,” and “Red Moon,” its closest counterpart, the less their hillbilly trappings come across like winks. The cumulative effect is something like a full-band version of the goofy southern accent Mick Jagger puts on when he sings country songs, which seems, for him, like a way of putting genre in quotation marks, signaling his awareness of his own inauthenticity by amplifying the hokiest parts of the put-on. Complementing the aforementioned fiddle and down-home harmony vocals-from Twain’s Mat Davidson, who appears on several songs-is the unmistakable boing of a jaw harp, boinging jubilantly and relentlessly, blissfully and diabolically, on every last beat. Or, in this case, stuff like “Spud Infinity,” a song that arrives early to unfurl Big Thief’s freak flag once and for all. Like those albums, it seems destined to become the favorite for a cult of hardcore fans, while inspiring others to wonder how someone could ride so hard for stuff like “ Piggies.” over the course of several months, it feels more like Big Thief’s Tusk, or White Album, or Wowee Zowee: a sprawling statement with little concern for outward cohesion, offering some combination of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor at any given moment, but not a particularly clear path from one song to the next. Recorded in four locations across the U.S. and Two Hands, Big Thief’s twin 2019 achievements, records with compact tracklists and particular aims, one eerie and diffuse, the other gritty and earthbound. Twenty times, it asks “What should we do now?”, and twenty times it finds a new answer.īy design, Dragon lacks the near-perfect holism of U.F.O.F. But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play. Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them. Lenker’s subject matter, stated as briefly as possible, is everything: internet signals and falling leaves, vape pens and wild hairdos, the wounds we inflict on the planet and each other, the Book of Genesis, the mystery of consciousness, and yes, the humble potato. You might check the liner notes to divine the source of the strangely expressive clicking you hear in the background of a particular instrumental passage and find that someone has been credited with playing icicles. There is trip-hop that flickers like busted neon and a couple of country tunes so saturated with fiddle and close harmony that they seem at first like jokes. In 20 songs, Big Thief have rambled far beyond the bounds of their previous catalog. As punctuation for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, an album as gleefully overstuffed as its title, this moment of studio chatter feels deliberate despite its offhandedness.
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