Big Thief - Dragon Warm Mountain I Believe in You Review
Big Thief Craft an Epic With “Dragon Warm Mountain I Believe in You”.
Left to their own devices, Big Thief collect like rainwater. The music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia gathers strength in time, the band itself growing more resilient and complex the more they write together. Tightening while feeling loose, yet always with a lightness. In late 2019, the band was touring in Europe for their two albums released that year, the mythic twins, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands. Krivechnia proposed the idea of writing the follow-up record. This prolific tilt is natural with the band’s current momentum, combined with a simmering curiosity, but it was led by a central question: “How do we encapsulate the different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting as well as the different aspects of the band onto a single record?”
The many worlds of Big Thief, all together in one swirling basin, which inevitably became “Dragon Warm Mountain I Believe in You” a stunning, colossal opus that not only serves as the band’s most captivating and brilliant work to date, but a towering achievement of folk-rock and Americana. In this project, the band encapsulates a spirit of emergence. The small becomes large, the moment, eternity. Author and activist Adrianne Maree Brown defines the phenomenon as “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”
When put to the frame of music, it is about the simple becoming beautifully complex. And everything pouring out of Lenker’s mind feels so simple, from freckles to apples, to the shadow of a cheek and the ether itself. Together these concepts become something beyond themselves, like sparrows gathering on brush, notes colliding into harmony, people growing and manifesting in communities. There is an openness, a trust, and a strength inherent to Big Thief that just is. And it grows.
The philosophy of experimentation and curiosity pushes this double-LP to the extremes, with an epic scope, clocking in around 80 minutes. But it all fits, whether you come in empty or already full. The dance between folk, electronic-influenced rock, teetering jams, and twanging country leave a feast for the mind and soul. The album treats music itself as a river flowing through us, popping at every turn.
Thanks to Meek’s flexible guitar styles and Lenker’s McCarthy-esque, stream-of-conscious lyrics, the band leans harder into country than ever, dives into shoegaze, touches on the ecstatic, and lays the landscape of love and chosen family bare. It is an ode to music itself, Big Thief channelling their music more than performing it.
Contributing to the album’s success in genre-jumping is the inherent nature of recording in four separate regions of the U.S. with four different engineers. Not only does this give different songs a unique authenticity but allows a playful and believable journey between each track. The songs of the Catskills are soft, tactile, and groovy with Sam Evian as engineer. Oleartchik contributes some of his most dynamic moments, from his lilting charm on closing track “Blue Lightning” to his deft subtlety on “12,000 Lines”. “Certainty”, one of the 8 (!) singles for the album, was apparently rolled out on the third day of a power-outage by candlelight, using Evian’s van to power a four-track recorder. Lenker sings of an unwavering love, sure as a season, “For you I am a child, believing/ You lay beside me sleeping on a plain/ In the future”.
The Topanga Canyon recordings, engineered by Shawn Everett are uniquely tangly and echoing. They include long-standing live tracks, “Simulation Swarm” and “Time Escaping”, the latter being a romping psychedelic jamboree. Krivechnia’s drums clack with precision and earnest ferocity, adding a riveting chaos that sparkles through the record.
In the Colorado Rockies with engineer of the twin albums Dom Monks, the band put down six songs including the title track, easily one of the most atmospherically beautiful they’ve ever made, as if each strum was channelled through vines, each snare reflected off a cloud. Lenker conjures a dragon as real as the trust she puts in it: “In the new warm mountain/ Where the storm face forms and speaks/ I believe in you/ Even when you need to/ Recoil”.
The trip rounded out in Tucson, AZ at Press On Studio, with Scott McMicken of Dr. Dog on the ones and twos. It is here the band recorded “Spud Infinity”, which may be their best song, channeling John Prine with a serious and humorous tale, as Lenker sings, “One peculiar organism aren’t we all together,” her brother backing them on jaw harp.
The through line is that the music of “DWMIBIY” has a life of its own. Listening to its tangling, wild, sometimes spiritual odes, it begs to be shared. Meek’s and Lenker’s soar alongside each other like birds. The rhythm section builds and falls with the tides. The captive listener is powerless against this, the desire to give it to the next person and say, “just watch this”. The band is at their most animated and risky, a completely raw form, unchecked and undistilled.
The frankly brilliant string of releases that are Big Thief’s first four records encapsulates several worlds that are integral to the band’s success. There are the riveting planets of the twin albums, the open heart and earnest story of “Capacity”, the compelling loves and lives of “Masterpiece”. And these past records hang as jewels in a home or play and dance like children. But “DWMIBIY” is the universe hanging around these works, like night-time itself. It is untilled land, broken-in shoes, wind and wishes, promises of new lives, the freedom of sky, soft light. It is a gift to fans, to humans and plants, conjuring Buffy Anne-Marie, Carole King, Beach House, road-trip epics, Prine.
Never does the album stop, and even in the last track a band member asks, “what should we do now?” as if there is no end. Oleartchik, in describing the feeling of being back with the band to his mom said, “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”
The music and the sound of “DWMIBIY” are untouchable. Try to pin it down, it playfully dares, you can watch the music soar off like a wave, the band standing beside you, in awe as well. The music beckons and Big Thief themselves willingly oblige, changing the course of indie music and folk in the process.