![]() ![]() As most of us hunkered down in our own private spaces, the members of Big Thief spent five months traveling to the Catskills in upstate New York, the Colorado Rockies, Topanga Canyon in Southern California, and Tucson, Arizona. and Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, though Big Thief sought to dream up their own creative utopias in four different corners of America, as if attempting to recover an idealized fantasy of what this country could be. It was the sort of gambit that conjures other great rock adventures like the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St. Before Covid hit, Krivchenia had a genius idea: Let’s travel the country and record many, many songs in several different locations. (Lenker has said that she was briefly hospitalized in 2020, in part, due to exhaustion from seven years of non-stop touring.) That drive for greatness seemed to be pushing them toward burnout. There was also their relentless work schedule of constant touring and prolific recording. and Two Hands contain some of their very best and most beloved songs, but there was also a sense that Big Thief might slip into a formula of austere, mid-tempo and kind of same-y sounding singer-songwriter music. On stage, however, Big Thief tore those songs open, with Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek suddenly raining down torrents of squalling feedback after lulling the audience with 45 minutes of intimate beguilement, as bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia somehow held it all together, like scotch tape around a tornado.īy 2019, they were indie stars, though there were also signs of strain. Whereas Masterpiece is more or less a rough and tumble alt-country record, Capacity showed them capable of playing with a quiet, unsettling intensity as singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker sang intimate art-folk songs in a stage whisper. In contrast, Big Thief represents the most endangered of modern pop anachronisms: A rock band with a real bond.īy the time of their second album, 2017’s Capacity, they had a signature sound. Big Thief emerged during a period of indie rock in which Bandcamp auteurs summoned online followings and then formed bands in order to tour. ![]() ![]() In their publicity photos, the members of Big Thief are always situated close together, to the point where they’re often literally falling over each other, as if they are attempting to physically merge. They are more like a body, in which each part performs a specific task so that the life form can move, breathe, think and feel. It’s a cliche to liken a band to a family or a sports team - most bands are really marriages of convenience - though in the case of Big Thief these analogies don’t go far enough. From the beginning, what distinguished them was that “intangible feeling that’s conjured when musicians with chemistry assemble in a room and become something greater than the sum of their respective parts,” as I put it upon the release of Masterpiece. In their own humble way, Big Thief has aspired to greatness more than any other American rock band I can think of from the past decade. Also: maybe they weren’t delusions after all. In the years since then, I’ve come to realize that Big Thief actually did indeed have such delusions. ![]() Surely, this modest, country-leaning indie rock band couldn’t really have such delusions of grandeur. It’s the trajectory of 99.9 percent of the artists who are lucky enough to even get noticed in the first place. But many of the bands who make my favorite albums wind up slowly fading back to obscurity after briefly bubbling up. Yes, I thought it was a great record - it was among my favorite albums of 2016. When Big Thief called their debut album Masterpiece, I assumed it was meant to be ironic. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. ![]()
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