Joel Thornton
Indie-folk titans Big Thief, now a decade in the game and presenting their sixth full-length LP, are veritable critical darlings. So much so that it’s easy to play a little game whenever one of their albums comes out: finding the music journalist that is the first to succumb to the Green Goblin mask of juicy-click contrarianism, vein protruding from their forehead, needing to write some bullshit about how not only are they not good, but actually, they were never good. I’ve won the game – I’ve found them. I’ve found them the last three album cycles.
What a wonderful problem it is to have to be so well respected as a songwriting force in your young career that you’re even receiving hack backlash for the sake of backlash.
Following the departure of founding bassist Max Oleartchik, frontwoman Adrianne Lenker leads the charge into uncharted territory – the hype for new material at a fever pitch following their 2022 double album offering, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. The result: their latest record, Double Infinity.
Track breakdown
Opener ‘Incomprehensible’ is a dose of rambling jangle-pop and, more importantly, contains the first mention of aging – a prominent, recurring theme throughout. The title refers to Lenker’s wishes to exist as such: to be abstract, beyond the realm and reach of superficial judgement and expectations. She looks to the older women of her family to ask the question: “How can beauty that is living be anything but true?”
The bright opening chords of ‘Words’ are basic, perhaps a little too much so, briefly recalling the muzak of some unskippable ad for airline tickets. The parts that keep it from outright cliché arrive quickly after, reverberating vocalisations of unformed… words. There’s some wonderful wandering guitar-solo work post-chorus, and in live versions (where the song is played much slower) I can’t seem to figure out who’s contributing what. My money is on this being Buck Meek however, and I can already picture the gyrating hips/chicken-neck move of which he’s so fond.
‘All Night All Day’ has a pretty baffling hook about how the good and bad of any given relationship can come disguised as one another – but in this instance, they don’t (?). It’s a deeply unsexy track for all its lustful subject matter – straight from a time capsule marked 1973 – but is perhaps the most pleasant thing you’d hear while on hold to your GP.
The title track is a double dose of long verses, which both utilise the same four-line vocal melody. The band are fond of these monotonous melodies (see ‘Sparrow’ off of DNWMIBIY) I assume as a centring technique, forcing listeners to really focus on the lyrics. Lenker’s strongest vocal performance can also be found here, and everything said so far, that seems to be no coincidence. There’s a tad more insecurity to the conversation than earlier: “Beauty speak to me / Let me know you, let me see / Myself inside your mystery / Through the crystal cage of aging”.
Grappling with identity
Halfway through my second listen, I realised that Double Infinity IS in fact their weakest effort to date, solely by virtue of being the least curious. Don’t worry, I’m still not going to hate-grift. It’s a funny old record. There’s always a competent tapestry of textures behind the vocals, but these compositions are often not doing enough to keep the ear engaged. The band picks a groove and locks it down – and it becomes wallpaper. It would be all well and good if this was an album of Lenker’s usual calibre in terms of songwriting, but in that regard, there seems to be a similar ethos at play. Points are laboured and talked around with a surprising lack of concision. I like a narratively tight project that rewards listeners for following through-lines and engaging with its themes – but here, I never felt rewarded for noticing anything crop back up. Maybe it’s me, but the ideas did not compile into a greater whole. Instead I thought, “oh it’s this again” at a few junctures.
Nonetheless, I am completely positive this will be a lot of people’s favourite collection of songs by the band because it is markedly more palatable than they’ve ever sounded. That’s just not why I listen to Big Thief. I want to be confronted with a ‘Mary’, a ‘Contact’, a ‘Not’ (high points of albums gone by) – a song that only they could make and a key element to their explosion into the modern pantheon.
When the bassline of ‘No Fear’ was skulking around in the mix and I clocked the seven-minute run time I was in for, I was positive that it would be the song to switch things up. Instead, it follows the infuriating trend of it ending like it starts.
The choral feel of ‘Grandmother’ also fails to induce the togetherness it’s clamouring for, because “gonna turn it all, into rock and roll” is both an inane chant and a lie. I was simply dying for that kind of edge to emerge on one of these tracks.
Working on one’s confidence is an idea that permeates throughout the album, and this might be a tell to the mindset behind the music’s very making. Time will tell if this is a grand experiment, a transitional work or the manifesto of a group simply moving in a new direction. However, I doubt it will be kind to the relative mediocrity of Double Infinity.
