Big Thief are their own small ecosystem: Guitarist Buck Meek, bassist Max Oleartchik, drummer James Krivchenia, and Adrianne Lenker, the singer and oxygen of the Brooklyn quartet, whose lyrics can, among other things, bind all that is living and has ever lived together at the cellular level. Their music is a network of wood and wire, uncanny in its ability to sound undiscovered, like you’re stumbling upon a new species of folk rock with every song. And because they work so well as an organism, the band has a way of giving value to things that hang damp and wrinkled in our world. In the hands of Big Thief, emotion, dreams, nature, memory, even acoustic guitars are artifacts of immense size and power.
This power that Big Thief give to the natural (and supernatural) defines their third and undoubtedly best album, U.F.O.F., a mesmerizing flood of life filtered down into a concentrated drip. It’s weird in the literary new weird sense: fantastical, alien; it is an unknown presence. Spend time with this album and soon there is no tempo but Big Thief’s trot, no voice but Lenker’s whisper, you are in a now-but-then, a here-but-there. Guitar lines are Mobius strips, basslines lead you off the map, and the drums feel less like Krivchenia is hitting them and more like he is lifting sounds out of them. A dazzling record, no doubt, but the boundless joy comes from its glacial restraint, from sensing all that lies beneath its surface and all that goes unsung.
The mystery of U.F.O.F. comes in part from Lenker’s lonely and elliptical verse, like Emily Dickinson if she picked up a copy of Court and Spark. The darkness that defined Big Thief’s first two albums—the abuse and stalkers on 2016’s Masterpiece, the trauma and railroad spikes to the skull on 2017’s Capacity—has either evaporated or taken refuge deep in the subtext. What were once vivid scenes between lovers, mothers, and children are now rendered more dreamlike and misty, as if observed in the distance through an attic window. On the title track, seasons bend and maps turn blue, as Lenker waves goodbye to her “UFO friend” and sings that the best kiss she ever had was the “flickering of water so clear and so bright,” an image so indelible she revisits the “kiss of water” a few songs later. There are few greater pleasures than following Lenker’s pen to her places of solitude.