by Sam Jennings (@Walt_Whitmensch)
In which Big Thief—the best band in the world—stretches out completely. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, a funny, shambly, too-long album is also reminder of why that hyperbole remains mostly true. Not because of the band’s virtuosity or brilliance (of which there’s some), or even necessarily their profundity (of which there’s so much), but by a faith in simplicity, and by their being some of the only artists right now whose mission runs entirely counter to the world we live in. Their music leaves behind cities, machines, and rigid rhythms, where most of even our best music these days seems intent on replacing the sounds of human beings with a false mechanical magnificence.
True, it runs too long, and some of these songs are trivial, even a little boring. They’ve added a panoply of instruments, they’re dabbling in overt genre riffs, they’re messing with electronics—classic double album stuff. Yet when you listen to Big Thief at their best (same with Adrianne Lenker’s solo albums), other music just seems to fall away. Though never Nature, or Time: these things become more real, less hidden.
Lenker (an authentic American and Whitmanian for whom Nature always means Mother/Daughter, Death/Birth, Cycles of Love, Forgetting, and Remembering) has been our best songwriter for a while now—at least whenever Fiona and Joanna are absent from us, which is usually the case. Her melodies are starting to feel more and more like real folk songs—as if they’ve always been with us. Her tunes are more varied than ever. There are the classic Lenker songs (“Promise is a Pendulum”), the new country-folk numbers (“Red Moon,” “Certainty,” “Blue Lightning”), the groovy experiments (“Time Escaping,” “Heavy Bend”), and everything in between. The lyrics, too, run the gamut from simple to extravagant. On “Change,” she sings: “Would you live forever, never die/ While everything around passes?” On “Spud Infinity” she laughs the lines: “When I say celestial/ I mean extraterrestrial/ I mean accepting the alien you’ve rejected in your own heart.”
There are references to science fictional electricity, to currents and waves and energy shields, but they still only contribute to her picture of strange Nature at work. Though Lenker hasn’t always managed to integrate her love for a kind of precious poesy (“Monastery monochrome/Boom balloon machine and all,” from 2016’s “Mary” comes to mind) or her sometimes awkward images, she’s working them out better than ever, especially in an extraordinary runaround of the Eden story in “Sparrow” and all across the restless title track: “There’s a dragon on the phone line/ Coughing up a mighty flame/ With a tongue of silver, silver/ Calling out my oldest name.”
The image feels just right. To me, it’s clearly Emerson’s God within, the “best and oldest part” of us all. Lenker’s words take on all the strange imagistic powers of authentic vision and myth. Though the band breaks little new ground on the record (“Little Things” being the dizzying exception) that’s hardly the point—the point is the movement towards that ancient authenticity, which inside us is imagination and outside us is Nature, both poles tied together by Love. In “Simulation Swarm,” one of the best songs Lenker will ever write, she sings:
“From the 31st floor of the simulation swarm/ With the drone of fluorescence/ Flicker, fever, fill the form/ With a warm gush, now I wanna touch/ Like we never could before/ I'd fly to you tomorrow, I'm not fighting in this war/ I wanna drop my arms and take your arms/ And walk you to the shore.”
In the war of all against all, in the cruel crush of fluorescent modern life, where is Lenker? She is rushing to her beloved, gathering her in her arms, seeking refuge in a truth which is beyond, which is possibly even mystical. I find myself overwhelmed by the promise. For Lenker, love remains out there somewhere, on the road, only waiting on those who will try to look for it.