Big Thief has always been an intimate affair. A lot of the time, it seems like the band’s members — vocalist/guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and, until his recent departure, bassist Max Oleartchik — can’t get close enough to one another. On stage, no matter how much space they’ve got, they’ll set up and play crammed close together in the center. In photos, they’re usually touching each other, and sometimes they’re on the floor draped over each other in a cuddle puddle. In one interview, Oleartchik said that he felt like the four of them had “melted into each other.” Incidentally, a Twitter search for Big Thief polycule is not short on results.
And they do, in fact, have lots of songs where they need to be doing all this. It’s not just that their music is so achingly sensitive, so full of wonder for the world and the mystery of love, that it would seem phony if made by people who weren’t so nakedly in touch with their feelings in daily life. It’s also that, instrumentally speaking, Big Thief sound like they’re reading each other’s minds. In every song you can so clearly hear each individual: Krivchenia’s grooves, coaxed from his drums like a temperamental animal tamed; Meek’s impressionistic lead guitar, which comes in loose and gasping squawks that can sound like alien morse-code transmissions; Oleartchik’s light-footed and curious bass; Lenker’s earthly and grounding rhythm guitar — all of it led by Lenker’s generationally brilliant voice, plaintive and quivering yet resolute and formidable, often wrapped up in Meek’s gentle harmony. The interplay between each of these elements, the way they anticipate each other’s ebbs and flows and feel both intricately connected and free at once, is what has always made Big Thief feel like something rare and special.
So I probably wasn’t the only fan who became worried when the band announced Oleartchik’s departure for “interpersonal reasons” last July. (No further explanation has been given by either party, though earlier that year Lenker suggested difficult conversations were being had regarding Oleartchik’s relationship to his hometown of Tel Aviv, where he currently lives). How does a band so clearly composed of four equal parts, and so inextricably tied to the relationship between those parts, navigate a departure like this? After five progressively excellent albums, would that magic now be subtly punctured by the change in dynamic?
Perhaps in anticipation of those questions or perhaps not, the now-trio took a left turn for the process of their sixth album, Double Infinity. On top of the three core members, they assembled a band of 10 musicians. There’s a new bassist, of course, but there are also three percussionists, three backing vocalists, an extra guitarist, a player alternating between keys and live tape loops, and the esteemed new-age musician Laraaji on zither and “intuitive vocal melodies.” All 13 of them played together on every song, tracking live at New York’s Power Station Studios, the place famous for its acoustics, where Bruce Springsteen chose to capture the sound of the E Street Band on The River.
The result is breathtaking. Despite the number of players, the impression isn’t one of grandeur nor complexity — it’s more like the songs penetrate further than before, or they float on the surface of a vast lake that the band get to swim in. No longer can you pick out each instrument and the personality of the musician playing it. Instead, the feeling of the song is magnified above all its components. On opening track “Incomprehensible,” aside from Lenker’s echoey vocals on top and bass and drums at the bottom, I can make out chimes and all manner of other glimmery textures poking out of a spongey wall of sound in the middle. But mostly, I hear a sonic manifestation of the mystery and awe that animates the lyrics. Similarly, the love song “All Night All Day” — with its many-layered harmonies and its wash of yearning, blissful sounds — overflows with the mingled euphoria and melancholy that make up a romance.
Regardless of the bells and whistles, these songs have an essential simplicity that makes it still feel accurate to call Big Thief a folk band. You want to bliss out to the sounds, sure, but you also want to be singing the words with other people. Maybe this is just the Brit in me, but all of it makes me feel like I need to be dancing to it in a field somewhere with some good friends — especially the rapturous “Happy With You,” on which Lenker pretty much just repeats “I’m happy with you/ Why do I need to explain myself?” over a joyful leading bassline.
A lot of that accessibility and simplicity is thanks to Lenker’s lyrics. They’re open-hearted and lovely, more so than ever, and their realness and plainness keeps them from being saccharine. These songs are about the inexorability of passing time, the uselessness of language, and how love and music, if we let them, can fill the gaps between these things we try to hold on to but never can. We begin with Lenker processing her feelings about approaching her mid-thirties on “Incomprehensible.” “I’m afraid of getting older, that’s what I’ve learned to say/ Society has given me the words to think that way,” she sings, before thinking about her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and how their beauty deepens as they age and wrinkle: “How can beauty that is living be anything but true?”
Elsewhere on the album, time isn’t just what ages us; it’s what brings people away from each other, and maybe in the end, back to each other too. “Feels like it’s been 10 years, has it only been two years? Two years feels like forever,” she sings on “Los Angeles” as she reunites with an old lover. For a minute she revisits her shortcomings in that relationship, before relinquishing: “We don’t need to talk about that now/ We’re finally in a good place, meeting face to face.” The point of “Los Angeles” is that this love stands outside of time, survives it in a way that our bodies or the world around us can’t. She comes back to that idea on the heartbreaking, bittersweet closing track, “How Could I Have Known”: “They say time’s the fourth dimension/ They say everything lives and dies/ But our love will love forever/ Though today we said goodbye.” The song’s narration sets Lenker wandering through Paris, presumably on tour, looking at the padlocks left by long-gone couples: “It reminded me of everyone I have ever tried to claim.”
“Words” introduces the album’s other recurring idea. “Words are tired and tense/ Words don’t make sense/ Words are feathered and light/ Words won’t make it right,” Lenker sings on the chorus. Yet as she sings those words, with the band behind her shedding the restraint of the verse, she sounds not defeated but celebratory. Is it freeing, that realization? On “Los Angeles,” Lenker feels her lover’s call “even without speaking,” and then she repeats, in one of the album’s most moving moments (though appropriately, I’m not sure I can explain why), “You sang for me.” She’s not much interested in speaking on the love song “All Night All Day,” either: “All night all day I could go down on you,” is how she opens that one. And specifically, she wants to hear her partner “sing” their pleasure; again, where words fail, music crosses the divide.
The six-minute “Grandmother” feels like the centerpiece of the album. Lenker sings about everyday sources of pain: the first verse about realizing that the world we know will disappear, and the second about apologizing to a loved one after a shitty day. But the refrain is an offering of absolution: “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll,” Lenker and the chorus of backing singers repeat. Maybe that line sounds corny written down, but in the song it’s an absolute miracle, backed by the sensation of that huge band creating and sharing in a joyful space. “Grandmother” gives a lot of space to Laraaji’s wordless vocalizing, which takes lead at some points and weaves throughout that refrain, making it feel even more like an exaltation of relinquishing simple words and surrendering to song. The best part of the track is during the big jam section at the end, where you can hear some of the other backing vocalists following his lead and abandoning words, and then Lenker breaking into a smile. As is the case across the album, it’s the communality of the music itself that makes its ideas tangible and life-affirming.
If you’ve read this far and you’re a Big Thief skeptic, you may have gathered by now that this probably won’t be the album that convinces you. It’s certainly the most Big Thief album, partly because of the band’s literal expansion and partly because the sense of whimsy and wonder and mysticism that underscores their music has never been more focused. Fence-sitters will for sure struggle to make it through “No Fear,” the album’s longest track at seven minutes, which simply meditates on the same four lines and bassline. But for those already on board, the outcome of the band reaching their “established enough to fuck around” stage like this is an absolute treat. It’s emblematic of what I love about Big Thief that instead of trying to replace one single element, they responded to their loss by creating a bigger, more communal, more celebratory sound. Like the song says, they took a major creative disruption and turned it into rock and roll.
Double Infinity is out 9/5 via 4AD.
