“What should we do now?” someone asks off-mic at the end of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “Blue Lightning,” the last song, has just ended, its homey folk-rock atmosphere made briefly uncanny by the entrance of cheap synthetic brass in the final minute, punching out a two-note fanfare that an ordinary band would have assigned to an actual horn section. The speaker—presumably one of the three men in Big Thief who orbit singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker—sounds dazed but satisfied. Clearly, they have nailed the take. So what next?
As punctuation for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, an album as gleefully overstuffed as its title, this moment of studio chatter feels deliberate despite its offhandedness. In 20 songs, Big Thief have rambled far beyond the bounds of their previous catalog. There is trip-hop that flickers like busted neon and a couple of country tunes so saturated with fiddle and close harmony that they seem at first like jokes. You might check the liner notes to divine the source of the strangely expressive clicking you hear in the background of a particular instrumental passage and find that someone has been credited with playing icicles.
Lenker’s subject matter, stated as briefly as possible, is everything: internet signals and falling leaves, vape pens and wild hairdos, the wounds we inflict on the planet and each other, the Book of Genesis, the mystery of consciousness, and yes, the humble potato. Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them. But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play. Twenty times, it asks “What should we do now?”, and twenty times it finds a new answer.
By design, Dragon lacks the near-perfect holism of U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, Big Thief’s twin 2019 achievements, records with compact tracklists and particular aims, one eerie and diffuse, the other gritty and earthbound. Recorded in four locations across the U.S. over the course of several months, it feels more like Big Thief’s Tusk, or White Album, or Wowee Zowee: a sprawling statement with little concern for outward cohesion, offering some combination of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor at any given moment, but not a particularly clear path from one song to the next. Like those albums, it seems destined to become the favorite for a cult of hardcore fans, while inspiring others to wonder how someone could ride so hard for stuff like “Piggies.”
Or, in this case, stuff like “Spud Infinity,” a song that arrives early to unfurl Big Thief’s freak flag once and for all. Complementing the aforementioned fiddle and down-home harmony vocals—from Twain’s Mat Davidson, who appears on several songs—is the unmistakable boing of a jaw harp, boinging jubilantly and relentlessly, blissfully and diabolically, on every last beat. The cumulative effect is something like a full-band version of the goofy southern accent Mick Jagger puts on when he sings country songs, which seems, for him, like a way of putting genre in quotation marks, signaling his awareness of his own inauthenticity by amplifying the hokiest parts of the put-on. Though Big Thief have taken many approaches to their music over the years, this sort of winking magpie postmodernism has not been one of them, so it’s strange to hear them leaning into a schtick.
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Tagged: Alternative Music, music blog