It’s hard to believe that this 20-track album, over 80 minutes of music that ranges wide in styles and textures, is the sound of Big Thief slowing down. The Brooklyn-based indie folk quartet released both their third and fourth albums in the same year, 2019. Since 2018, guitarist Buck Meek has released two solo albums and frontwoman Adrianne Lenker has put out three. But it was only when the global lockdown scuppered the band’s intense touring schedule that they were able to indulge in longer recording sessions in multiple locations.
This fifth release saw them working with different sounds and feels, with four different engineers in studios in upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, the Rocky Mountains and Tucson, Arizona. The varied working environments mean there isn’t a unified feel, other than Lenker’s fragile, birdlike voice, but it gives the potential for a new favourite song every day as the listener delves deeper into this rich soundworld.
Mat Davidson of Twain, who joined the band on fiddle for the Arizona sessions, wrote about the experience: “Sometimes, people say a band has ‘found their sound’. I don’t know if this is a good thing. By contrast, Big Thief is a band about finding sound.” There’s a loose, questing feel to the instrumentation, experimentation encouraged. A gentle flute meanders through No Reason. Wake Me Up to Drive tries mixing electronic drumbeats with an accordion drone. The title track seems to spend its first minute limbering up before the song fully unfurls.
With each member a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music, they don’t rely on multiple takes and layers. Often songs sound live, worked through on the spot. The old timey acoustic ballad Change, which opens the album, is a recording of them practising, getting ready for an official version. The spontaneity extends to recording the exquisite 12,000 Lines while still in wet swimsuits from a trip to a nearby creek, and capturing Certainty outside, using a four-track tape recorder powered by a truck’s cigarette lighter.
Lenker is usually an intense lyricist – her take on the Adam and Eve story in Sparrow is particularly powerful – but there’s fun being had here too. Little Things whooshes along on jangling electric guitars. On the country swing of the bizarrely titled Spud Infinity she mentions potato knish and suggests: “Kiss your body up and down, other than your elbows.” The swaying, slightly silly concluding song, Blue Lightning, ends with someone saying: “What shall we do now?” On the evidence presented here, they can do absolutely anything.
