- My favourite Big Thief songs have names. They’re about a Paul, a Lorraine, a Matthew. On UFOF, the Brooklyn band’s frontwoman Adrienne Lemker gives us new characters to revel in, and it’s arguable they’re central to the record’s success.
Formed in 2015, the band is still in relative infancy, but UFOF speaks to a maturation of their sound. All four members operate seamlessly, lending the right intensity, or restraint to each phrase within twelve tracks that breathe and groan, documents of real life’s murkiness.
This is most clear on tracks like From. It sounds like looking through a kaleidoscope, holding a feeling to the light and watching its colours fragment. Handclaps and bells softly clatter over one another as the ebb and flow of melodic finger-plucking cocoons Lemker’s vocal line in the refrain, a murmured meditation: “no one can be my man, be my man, be my man”.
Leading tracks Contact and UFOF evoke elements of Sharon Van Etten’s recent album, Remind Me Tomorrow. The band delays the default indie-rock build of layered guitars and crashing drums on the album’s first songs; instead, they introduce alien elements which slip atop the surface of folky melodies like oil. On UFOF there’s warped vocals and bubbly texture over the bridge. Like the spiking metallic slides in Van Etten’s Seventeen, the embellishments are inherently pretty, but the way they contrast the core of the song also work to bring out it’s sweetness. Of course, the band can still construct a lingering slow burn to match the likes of Mythological Beauty. The hook in Jenni reminds me of Broken Social Scene’s Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old” - there’s an expansive delight in the kick drum and electric guitar line that drones over Lemker as she sings “Jenny is in my room”.
Lemker’s poetic and at times visceral lyrics are as much a drawcard as ever. On Orange, with a Neil Young sensibility, she croons: “Orange is the colour of my love / Fragile orange, wind in the garden / Fragile means that I can hear her flesh / crying little rivers in her forearm.” On Contact: “Wrap me in silk / I want to drink your milk”.
However, the nature of many of the intensely intimate relationships contained within the lyrics, and even the perspective they are delivered from are stubbornly cryptic. UFOF’s moving closer, Magic Dealer, sees Lemker address another unknown - she says: “I am the photograph in you / still as the moment we’re lying in right now,” before the album fades to gurgle and static, mimicking the alien abduction she fantasises about in the titular track. Similarly, we can’t identify Betsy against the backdrop of the city in the song named for her. Jodie, in Contact and Caroline in Cattails are strangers to us; but it’s the act of naming them that reveals them to us. Caroline is sunbaking with her wrinkled skin and lawn chair. Betsy is driving past poison street lights with auburn hair.
UFOF sees Big Thief come into their own and continue their sometimes tender, sometimes abrasive exploration of place in the world. Four years of near-non stop touring has cemented them as a unit and the looser, more experimental nature of some of these songs should intrigue well beyond an initial listen. However fans should be most excited to meet a new cast of characters who act as anchors amid the fog.
- Aleisha McLaren.