Big Thief - Double Infinity
4AD
★★★★
In June 2014, a parapet on the Pont Des Arts bridge in Paris collapsed under the weight of the padlocks attached to it by couples determined to immortalise their relationships in the City Of Love. Since the “love locks” fad started around 2008, municipal officials estimated 45 million tonnes of sappy metal had been attached to – and removed from – the Napoleononic bridge, causing, a notably unromantic spokesperson said, “long-term heritage degradation and danger to visitors”. On How Could I Have Known, the closing track on Big Thief’s sixth album, Adrianne Lenker sings about walking through Paris and coming across the overloaded Seine crossing. “As I stood along that river / where the lovers left their chains / it reminded me of everyone I had ever tried to claim,” she sings, her voice at full Dolly Parton-in-space quiver.
Not everything or everyone can be locked down, kept in place – not least Big Thief’s fleet, mysterious songs. Since their 2016 debut Masterpiece, the band – now Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek and drummer and sometime producer James Krivchenia - have explored all the weighty baggage that life piles up around people: old lovers, past traumas or even (as on the caterpillar-butterfly imagery of Masterpiece’s Parallels) the human body. Lenker is often engaged in discerning the difference between keepsake and dead weight, her songwriting vibrating with the desire to cut through the clutter and touch on something essential and true. On Double Infinity, that’s apparent on the trance-like Happy With You, a lyrically minimal song that boils down to a salt of wonder and grief: “Happy with you / why do I need to explain myself? / Poison and shame”. On the psychic deep-dive of Words, meanwhile, Lenker prods at the limits of language – “Words are tired and tense / words don’t make any sense” - electro-mechanical piano and tape loops further muddying the subconscious waters.
While Big Thief’s endearing collective mythology casts them as free-ranging hippie-ish wanderers living in camper vans or creek-side cabins and existing in a collective on-the-road tangle - Lenker used to says she was “homeful” rather than homeless – they have never travelled light. Double Infinity is airier than 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You or 2019’s dual releases Two Hands and UFOF, but it’s far from unburdened, still grappling with toxic legacies, outgrown relationships and increasingly, the speedy passage of time. The opening track, Incomprehensible, is a wind-in-the-hair description of an accidental Canadian road trip, Lenker describing how she’s travelling with a box of her old things, among them obsolete gadgets and “Mr Bear”. “The only things I’ll keep are the letters and the photographs,” she sings with quiet certainty, hanging on to the important stuff, the stuff that presses a moment into place.
As Lenker’s commitment to “archiving” her music suggests, Big Thief’s songs have often served a similar purpose. As rich in people’s names and landscape details as they are in big-sky pondering, they balance metaphysical gauziness with physical solidity. There are still moments on Double Infinity where that focus is as sharp as ever. Incomprehensible is full of vivid specifics, Lenker going all I-shall-wear-purple in her attempt to combat her fear of aging, a hint that Big Thief are in their Everybody Hurts phase. Los Angeles, meanwhile, begins with bubbling laughter, the bold Americana detailing – plane-seat numbers, references to the Grand Canyon, wide-screen romance - suggesting a macrobiotic E Street band.
Yet there is a diffuseness here, too, a sense of these songs being not quite as tightly held to the band’s collective chest. In part, that’s out of necessity. The loss of original bassist Max Oleartchik last summer for “interpersonal reasons” was a notable wrench for a band who have frequently seemed as much commune as pop group, whether tumbled together like a basket of kittens in photographs or requesting they are interviewed collectively (“We kind of insist on it, even though its sometimes harder for the interviewers, because I think it’s important for us to be unified and seen as an entity,” Lenker told MOJO last month. “We really are a band”.)
Reuniting after this rupture and a run of separate solo projects – Lenker’s Bright Future, Meek’s Haunted Mountain and drummer and (sometime producer) Krivchenia’s Performing Belief – they found that their initial work as a trio wasn’t catching light. Not wanting to ship in a new member just to restore numbers, they decided to open up their intense little nucleus, recording Double Infinity in a room at New York’s Power Station studio with 11 musicians, among them new-age zither mage Laraaji, singers Hannah Cohen and June McDoom, and percussionist Mikel Patrick Avery of BASIC and Natural Information Society.
The in-the-room shimmer matches their cosmic energies perfectly, the improvisational arrangements giving the songs a newly podded, freshly husked glow. There’s a loveliness to the woodcraft-folk Cure of No Fear, taking the Flaming Lips cosmic grandeur down to soil-level while Lenker intones gnomic little phrases, among them the artwork-explaining “there is no time / round like a lime”. Grandmother, the first song the trio co-wrote, has the rise-and-fall of a street-corner religious meeting, Laraaji’s keening vocals underlining the song’s key message: “Gonna turn it all / into rock’n’roll”. Music becomes a way to transform trials into transcendence, and to help, there are tape loops and drones. The carnal All Night All Day begins like a hand-carved My Bloody Valentine, while on Happy With You, Krivchenia and Lenker are credited with “ambience”.
Fans of the cryptic interiority of UFOF or Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’s outlaw power-surges might feel Double Infinity is a transitional kind of record. For all its ease and warmth, it doesn’t quite feel like before, when it seemed Big Thief could simply strike a rock with a stick and songs would flow out. At its core, though, is the title track, Lenker looking beyond the turmoil of a world on fire or underwater to something eternal and irreducible: “the eye behind the essence / unmoveable, unchanging.” These songs convey a sense of the work put into them, a sense of the world outside, but that doesn’t undermine Big Thief’s ability to lock in on something profound.
Double Infinity is out September 5 on 4AD
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Track Listing:
Incomprehensible
Words
Los Angeles
All Night All Day
Double Infinity
No Fear
Grandmother [ft. Laraaji]
Happy With You
How Could I Have Known
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