The songs reach for something – love, memory, hope – and the noise and melody of the music bring the ideas into reach while somehow embracing the true anguish in the words.ĭragon moves the songs along the same path, but there is a newness to the path, as though the fog lifts and it becomes easier to walk it. The band – Buck Meek (guitar), Max Oleartchik (bass), and James Krivchenia (drums) – buoys Adrianne’s voice, lifting her higher and higher until it’s time to come back down. ![]() Big Thief plays with tension and dynamics, painting with broad and tiny brushstrokes alike. On the earlier records, the songs buzz between ragged beauty and sleek shadows, at times raw like a just-remembered and once-forgotten dream, her voice alternating between a whisper and an explosion, the music shimmering between a storm-beaten surf and a gentle tide. I remember the first time I listened to Masterpiece, past the sun’s setting but not yet in the dark dark of a summer night, Adrianne’s quiet-to-powerhouse voice rising like heat from my car windows. “ Blurred View” was the biggest surprise – I don’t think it’s been played live yet – but the most revelatory songs from Dragon were the pulsating “ Simulation Swarm” and the absolutely and unexpectedly powerful set-closing “ Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.” Many fans will also express a lighthearted joy at the encore-ending “Spud Infinity” (appropriately and frequently likened to John Prine), which included Adrianne’s brother Noah on jaw harp. Dragon – essentially a 4-part album broken into sections based on geography (and absolutely the best album of 2022, one that will eventually enter the indie-rock pantheon alongside the likes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) – largely featured on the night, comprising just under half the playlist. They followed it quickly with “ 12,000 Lines”, a near-reflection of “Change” on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (henceforth, Dragon). The Anthem crowd hummed with anticipation, and when Big Thief took to the stage, they met the audience with smiles, waves, little hellos, and ambled into their first song, “ Change”, its bittersweet beauty and almost-tense exploration of life, death, living, and letting go. I think it’s the kind of music I’d love to see in a sacred space. During the beginning of the set, when I stepped around the photo pit, the music assailed me like heady incense: sudden, alluring, and truthfully captivating. The Anthem is a big place, and DC houses ungentle crowds, but they kept quiet close to the stage, the voices largely restricted to the Anthem’s foyer and thereabouts. It made me remember midnight masses, the interplay of the darkness of lost light and the brightness of a stage, the quiet devotion of a congregation in silence. Her music is textured, something more than ambient it takes on a holiness, that soft beauty of sitting on a log under a blanket of trees while the green air breathes life, or the way I felt sitting in a pew as a child and god still felt tangible, real. Kara-Lis Coverdale opened the show, the audience filtering in as her dreamscapes filled the Anthem. It’s an irrepressibly beautiful thing to learn about being human. ![]() ![]() It’s a confusing thing to write about being human. ![]() The songs very much function as living memories, tangible reminders of what was and will be again. And sometimes I suspect that sense of meaning listeners derive from the songs isn’t always strictly intended – though this is a serious band – and like all good and honest human philosophy, it comes from a place of experiencing, listening, reflecting, and telling. The songs ring with the tense both/and dichotomy of the knowable and the unknowable the deeper meaning is only understood when it’s been lived. She explores the tangled vines, less interested in taming or manicuring them, and more interested in knowing what it’s like to have the vines in her fingers, for her nails to fill with dirt and chip against unseen stones, to feel life in her hands. Have you ever taken a fist-sized rock – maybe in your backyard, maybe somewhere in the woods – and cracked it against the ground, its hidden crystals shining on the pavement, its center split, like two caves of shimmery beauty?īig Thief is that, glimmering heirs to this beautiful world, manufactured by time and experience, the pressures of existence.Īdrianne Lenker – Big Thief’s principle songwriter – pens songs that reflect the pursuit of understanding, less of knowledge and more about what it means to exist. Sometimes, the easy disenchantment of the music business overtakes us, its lab-grown and cut stones a little too much.
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