Game of poems
Close-knit Brooklynites return with renewed ambition after three members made solo albums in 2020.
Big Thief ★★★★ Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You 4AD. CD/DL/LP
IN ONE OF two free-form band biographies accompanying Big Thief’s fifth album, their friend Mat Davidson, a guest here on fiddle and more, summons a certain Austrian poet. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as criticism,” he writes, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke. “Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.”
It’s unintentional, perhaps, but Davidson’s citation feels like a disclaimer. An amorphous, stylistically diverse record you must savour and digest slowly, like a python eating a deer, the mystically-titled was recorded in four different locations with four very different engineers, its 20 questing songs culled from a possible 45 and speaking enigmatically of death, infinity and the celestial.
Four Berklee College Of Music graduates eschewing the studied or musically verbose, singer and chief songwriter Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia instead exude tangible devotion to their mission, namely to “record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians and chosen family.” It might seem self-aggrandising when Big Thief lay claim to a bond of “pure magic”, but there are moments here when the table levitates. Witness the ethereal title track with its bells and played icicles, or the tack-piano adorned waltz Sparrow, wherein Lenker’s strange, stark images – “threading the blood through the apple” etc – pack cumulative, bewitching power.
Bare-bones evocation Change is instantly captivating too, her precious voice exerting magnetic pull. It’s one of several songs that tumble in with the happenstance immediacy of field recordings, the mood and the moment all-important. As Big Thief get their heads together in upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, California, the Colorado Rockies and, finally, Tucson, Arizona, the album’s relaxed eat, live and create together vibes are unmistakable. We hear Lenker tell her dog Oso “it’s music”, lest the beast be sniffy about Time Escaping’s struck lattice of gamelan-like guitars. Elsewhere, her kid brother Noah twangs a carefree jaw-harp on rustic country dance, Spud Infinity.
It was drummer James Krivchenia, also producer here, who suggested Big Thief shouldn’t fret about stylistic cohesion, his rationale being that this would give a truer, broader picture of the band’s ongoing journey. This figures, of course, but good as the Edie Brickell & New Bohemians-ish pop bouncer Little Things and very ’80s, Cocteau Twins-like Flower Of Blood are, they do jar somewhat in this context, like time-travelling gate-crashers in a mostly bucolic landscape.
All that said, Dragon New Warm Mountain
I Believe In You is both an album of admirable ambition and a mantra worth repeating until its mysteries are revealed. And if you’re looking down, Rainer Maria Rilke, I hope you’ll countenance this attempt at a loving critique.