Art of noise moments in love haunting8/28/2023 ![]() It’s too spooky to count as pastoral U.F.O.F. The lyrics bristle with nature imagery: meteor showers, loons among the cattails, fruit bats crying, birds eating worms, silkworms boiled to make thread (“Strange”), frozen pigeons hitting the ground (“Orange”), dogs barking in the distance. After a few listens, each song rings out with disconcerting familiarity, like discovering a clearing in the woods you know you’ve been to before but can’t place when. is quieter, given to tiny plucked guitar arpeggios that emerge as hooks through the haze. Big Thief’s dreamworld is wilder, with many songs set in the natural wilderness, but it has the same enigmatic allure. Of their rock predecessors, they rather remind me of early R.E.M., whose strummed jangle and verbal inscrutability similarly conjured an immersive, half-remembered pastoral Southern dreamworld. They love American folk music for its vivid surreality, for the way vernacular idioms and stories with holes in them can create mystery they aim to capture the surprise of listening to an old song that talks to you directly from another place. Since not many folk-rock bands now sound like anything new, Big Thief stand out - their attraction to the genre comes not from rote traditionalism or the desire to embrace confessional tropes and let hearts bleed on sleeves, but from a fondness for whimsy. Thus they achieve a skewed balance between energy and calm, a quietly declarative introspection. Adrianne Lenker’s quavery, bent singing matches this aesthetic vocally. ![]() These songs flicker, keyed to the intricate chitchat between Buck Meek’s acoustic and electric guitars, which entwine with a hushed lightness accentuated and often obliterated by blasts of electric noise that eventually subside. Thanks to the band’s collective confidence and increasing willingness to pursue weirdness, on the two new albums that sound becomes its own striking, fully developed sonic template. They also rock, providing a reassuring touch of familiarity.īig Thief have been crafting fragile, noisy rock miniatures since their debut, Masterpiece (2016), on which their warm, rustic sound first emerged in a more rickety, lo-fi context. The Brooklyn folk-rock band’s two 2019 albums - U.F.O.F., out since May, and Two Hands, out since October - invent an imagined environment with its own internal logic, a densely wooded forest with strange, benevolent creatures lurking in the shadows, hidden machinery creaking under the soil. Big Thief have invented a scary, fanciful musical world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |