Iāve voted 5/5 on 20 different accounts though.
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Good point, I havenāt used any of my alts for a while.
Iām not saying I registered @big_thief_fraud_OUCH to give them a 1 but Iām also not saying that I didnāt do it either.
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Listened to all the records yesterday (not the solo ones, mind you). I still donāt get the adulation. Perfectly serviceable indie folk, but thereās very little that really caught my attention or snagged in my brain. A few nice guitar tones or phrases, but largely underwhelming. I guess they are one of those acts where if you get it, you really get it, and if you donāt theyāre going to pass you by. 2/5.
Couple of hot takes incoming:
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Iād have to listen again to confirm, but I reckon thereās an argument that that each album has been a little bit worse than the album preceding it, or the Arcade Fire syndrome as the medical profession describes it?
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has any band ever had such consistently bad covers across a four album run?
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I think the fact that their fans canāt agree at all on the order of the lps kind of argues against this. If there was a genuine drop off in quality there would be a more consensus view I think.
worst take in the thread! The covers are amazing! Iām especially glad they went for band photos for the last 2: more bands need to get themselves on covers these days.
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I think they are a band that if you listen to one of their albums in isolation you would at best think oh thatās quite nice and then forget about them. If you came in with very high expectations you would likely be disappointed and baffled. But each of their albums (including the 2 Adrianne solo records) have that rare and beautiful quality of just getting better and better with every listen, as well as somehow creating some sort of personal attachment.
Also - the first two covers are great, the last two are not!
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The UFOF artwork isnāt too bad but agreed the rest are very bad
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I really dislike the grainy old 80s photograph genre of album cover
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" To listen to Big Thief is to be welcomed into a makeshift family, immediately briefed on ancestral trees and private anecdotes. This is first-name-basis music: Their songs have titles like āPaul,ā āMary,ā āRandy,ā āLorraine.ā On the cover of Masterpiece is a photo of Lenkerās mother as a child, playing with a toy dinosaur; her uncles appear on the back. Capacity features an unforgettable photo of a teenage boy in overalls holding a newborn baby, his expression a youthful combination of defiance and fear. āThatās my Uncle Adam,ā Lenker tells me. Which means the baby is ā¦ ? āYeah,ā she says before I can finish. āHe was there when I was born.ā
(from here - The Big Themes and Big Dreams of Big Thief - The Ringer)
So yeah, I think those first two album covers are very much part of that sense of being invited into a very personal story, immersive.
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Wasnāt in the best song poll, but this absolutely stops me in my tracks every time.
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Right then cracks knuckles fair warning, this is going to be a long obsessive post about the popular rock band Big Thief.
As is probably pretty well known, if not before this thread certainly by now, Big Thief are a Big Fucking Deal for me. I have spent most of the last couple of years writing about them, as I feel Iām in the presence of greatness whenever I listen to them or see them live. Iām even dressed for the occasion:
Whatās interesting reading this thread (even in the above post just now) is that people seem to just consider them as ājust another indie-rock bandā working in that parameter. Yes, sure, they are, fundamentally, an indie rock band, but they operate in so many other realms be in defined by āgenreā or more appropriately, mood. From track to track they can go from slow-core/metallic post-hardcore (Contact, Jenni) to delicate folk (Orange, Wolf) to punk (Not, Shark Smile) to Beatles-esque anthemic rock/power pop (Masterpiece, Forgotten Eyes) to big sad ballads (Paul, Mary). Oh, and they also wrote one of the best indie rock songs of the last decade:
I mention mood rather genre because Big Thief, are, essentially a Big Mood. Each of their records captures a different, distinct mood or feeling, exploring everywhere they can go within that mode. On Masterpiece you have a young band first getting their footing with a slightly generic INDIE-ROCK album, but with some great songs showing all the potential they have going forward. A track like Real Love, for instance, goes for the jugular, a big, fairly obvious, emotional rock song but possesses enough intriguing little turns that shows Big Thief were going to be anything other than obvious.
A year and a bit later, they release Capacity (hey look I got it right today!) and show just what they are capable of. Gone is the wide-eyed optimism of their debut, and along with it, the romantic relationship between the bandās two central guitarists and songwriters, and comes a much darker, but much more confident, record. Here, Lenker doesnāt just open up with her changing and failing relationship with Meek, she also sings about herā¦ interesting upbringing. Growing up in a cult, Lenker showed she had an exceptional talent from an early age, writing songs as a child. Her father managed/pushed her into a teen solo-country act, just a year before Taylor Swift would release hers, but Lenker quickly realised it wasnāt for her, sheās too much of a free spirit to go down the conventional old beaten path.
The leaps and bounds the band came within a year (helped by James Krivchenia joining on drums) is quite incredible and fairly unheralded. The intricate layering that goes into Capacity can easily be missed, only unlocked on repeat listens, but Lenkerās songwriting and the instrumentation between the four of them really clicking into something more advanced that their debut is quite masterful. Tracks like Watering or Great White Shark quite rightly drew comparisons to Radiohead with enthusiasm rather than derision, while in the aforementioned Mythological Beauty, they had a proper āindie-rockā hit to hang their collective hats on. It is, as others have suggested, the closest theyāve come to an artist and era-defining record, but the feeling that they still have more to come is incredibly exciting.
Their next trick, however, would blow everything out of the water. After (re)-introducing everyone to her folk roots on the gorgeous, soulful solo album abysskiss Adrianne Lenkerās songwriting talents and prowess apparently knew no bounds, as encouraged by writing on her own for a year (and each of the band members except for her moving away from New York City) she became the official bandleader. Some critics were a little dismayed that Big Thief was very much āAdrianne Lenker + bandā rather than the more collaborative effort of the firs two records, and I understand that to an extent, but what it did was allow her to fully envision all the different places she wanted to take her music.
I talked about each album have a specific mood, well, nothing is clearer than in 2019 when they released TWO COMPLETELY DISTINCT, BRILLIANT ALBUMS that are still uniquely her and them. As translated by the albumās respective covers, U.F.O.F was recorded in literal spaced-out greener pastures of Washington state, it is an album representing the season in which it was released, the spring, with many images of nature and re-birth running through the songs as Lenker found new love and an attempt to express the connectivity of everything. Then, a few months later, Big Thief shocked us all with their hot, dirty, cramped, sweaty height of summer record Two Hands, recorded in the Texan desert (for the record Masterpiece is Autumn/Fall & Capacity is Winter - maybe Winter II will be next) which was dismayed at the destruction of the earth and sexual lust and desire, the complete antithesis of the album released just months before.
Interestingly both records also serve as counterpoints to the two that preceded them, U.F.O.F very much expands on the dark themes of Capacity this time giving them a more optimistic, atmospheric, alien, even, feel while Two Hands goes full circle and brings Masterpiece down to the grittier reality of what happens to that younger self when it grows up and realises the world is quite a fucked up place. Across them, Lenkerās songwriting just keeps getting bigger and better, with her scope and horizons widening with every passing record.
While Big Thief may well be Lenkerās ābandā now, a big reason why all this works is that every member is insanely talented at what they do, and click with each other on a level that I imagine most people found so exciting about a lot of 60s music. Iāve mentioned this upthread, but this really comes across when you see them live. Funnily enough, the first time I saw them at HAVEN festival in 2018 in Copenhagen, I was actually a little underwhelmed. Iād only really got into Big Thief properly right at the tail end of 2017 thanks to AOTY write-ups and discussions, after initially not thinking that much of them, letting them wash over me like I suspect many casual listeners do when they first approach them, but one day I watched the video to Mythological Beauty and all of a sudden I was hooked. I spent practically every day at home for Christmas of 2017 - when I was living in Berlin and not exactly making a great time of it - obsessing over this record, suddenly realising just what a special release it is. A few months later, it then became a break-up record, it was what I reached for in a moment of real heartbreak and disappointment (see also: Offerings by Typhoon and, to a lesser extent, Have You Considered Punk Music? by Self Defense Family) and it got me through quite a dark period of my life.
So when I finally got to see them in the summer of 2018, I was expecting to have this big emotional outpouring based on seeing this band who had really hit me hard in a big way only a few months earlier, coming out of arguably the lowest point in my life, even if granted it was a festival setting. What I got, surprised me. What I found wasnāt a super serious, super tightly rehearsed or super emotional band, but a group of pals having a good time playing music together. They only played 3 songs off of Capacity and I wasnāt fully into Masterpiece yet, Lenker kept forgetting the lyrics to Mythological Beauty and initially I was actually pretty annoyed by this and her laughing it off, but have later realised is a nervousness coming out as humour, and she and they would, now looking back quite hilariously, play some songs that a year later would I would completely fall in love with, in Orange & Magic Dealer as the encore, whereas Shoulders and, yesā¦ you guessed it, Not, featured in the main set.
After initially being a little confused by the experience, it didnāt diminish my love of the album I was expecting to see more of - in fact it made me want to see more - and through her solo album later that year, also attached to quite an emotional period of time, I saw her perform solo at Union Chapel in London and now it all started to click. In this context, her awkward sense of humour made sense, along with her penchant for debuting new songs you will love in the future (this time Cut My Hair & Zombie Girl), even if this one featured the album the tour was supporting more in earnest.
This was quite an important moment because this means I entered 2019 now understanding Lenker and her band better, along with the different modes they operate in between live and the studio. I spent basically all of 2019 waxing lyrical about how vital and incredible this band had become, to my eyes and ears, unlike anyone else really around at the moment:
At the London Roundhouse (a great but notoriously difficult venue to navigate), the bandās connection and sheer power was very apparent, as they made the couple thousand capacity venue feel intimate as the band stood in a semi-circle feeding off each otherās energies as much as the crowds. Now knowing what to expect, this show really meant lift-off in terms of my adoration for this band, this time when they played Not and Shoulders I immediately felt their impact just as much as familiar classics (by now I had also got into Masterpiece), you can read more about that here:
https://www.londoninstereo.com/big-thief-live-review/
Three months later I was very lucky to have witnessed a show that will probably go down in my top 5 shows of all time, as, in-between festival dates, Big Thief announced their second album of 2019, Two Hands, released the earth-shattering āNotā and that they were to play the new album in full at the tiny Bush Hall in Londonās west end.
I mention it in the article, but playing āNotā now with a grounded context of its recent release as a single, it felt like the whole room was going to blast off into space such was the ferocity of this rendition. Meanwhile, on tracks like āReplacedā (as above) you could see the band still getting a feel for these songs, some of which they were performing live for the first time. Either way, it was a brilliant way to cap off an incredible year for the band and Lenker personally, as they had achieved a rare feat of releasing two linked-yet-distinct, equally brilliant albums and built a pretty incredible, evolving tour to boot.
Somewhat fittingly, Big Thief were the last band I saw live before the world went to shit, at Glasgowās Fruitmarket. I went up especially as I didnāt particularly fancy the size of the Hammersmith Apollo, not because I didnāt think the band were capable but because of that amount of people in an enclosed place, but also because playing the beautiful Fruitmarket in my favourite UK with all my pals was too good of an opportunity to pass up. They were brilliant again, of course, but as I was clocked off for this one I didnāt need to analyse this one, confident and comfortable that it was going to be a great time while in the back of our collective minds the reality of an impending global pandemic was ever so slightly creeping up on us and becoming slowly fully realised. It was, for that moment at least, a wonderful moment. Even if there was a sense of dread hanging in the air if anything an even more cherished memory of being basically the last time things felt normal (even the Spurs vs Norwich FA Cup game I attended two days later made it increasingly apparent we were heading into a dark period with all the various warnings and reminders about hand sanitation due to COVID-19).
I have gone on for far too long now so will stop here. Iām aware my constant gushing of this band probably equally puts people off as much as it does encourage them to keep listening. Iām not here to tell you what to do, merely state that Big Thief have, for the last five years at least, for me risen to a very special space occupied only by the likes of Fucked Up or Fugazi or Unwound. I connect with their music and Lenkerās worldview on an incredibly deep level - and I donāt say that to make it sound like Iām therefore better or smarter - it reaches deep into my soul and being and pulls out stuff I didnāt even know was there. In Lenker I truly believe we have a once-in-a-generational talent, this threadās earlier comparisons to Neil Young feel particularly prescient, and while I understand she (and they) arenāt going to be for everyone, what she (and they) have achieved over the last half a decade is truly quite staggering. Four brilliant albums with her incredibly gifted band, and two equally fantastic solo albums that show she is something of a spiritual deity, crafting beautiful, or ugly, images through her words and her music, reflecting a huge range of different moods and emotions we go through in life.
It is for that reason, and many others, readers (if any of you are still here) that Big Thief are a Big Five from me.
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Amazing. Thanks for this pal.
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I slightly ruined the song for myself one time when I realised the breakdown has the same chord progression as Adamās Song by Blink-182 
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and by ruined I mean, improved.
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their songs use everything in the universe so, yes.
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thanks for ruining the spoiler tag
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Hail to the Big Thief
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also donāt make me tap the sign.
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probably!
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