Big Thief will save London from itself
On the way home from Big Thief’s opening night at Brixton’s O2 Academy, a woman on the lower deck of my bus threatened to shoot a stranger.
I started, wide-eyed, glancing around to see if anyone was as perturbed as I, but the London folk had their head down, blinkers on. The man’s earlier protestations were silenced, and the woman cackled her bloodthirsty cackle; it was just another night in the capital.
Everyone in London is angry right now. On a singular tube platform on my delayed journey to the show, I spotted four different arguments. A night or two before, I walked through Soho and saw young men throwing punches at one another, and around the next corner, a group of hooligans sprinting from a small cafe, bill unpaid. The server stared on from the threshold, looking a strange mixture of sickened and sad.
It seems we have effectively become numb to the larger atrocities of war, fascism, genocide, and so are inflicting small cruelties upon one another just to remind ourselves that we still have a capacity to feel, that we are still here, and not in the digital simulacrum where nothing else is possible and everything always happens. In doing so, the only steps we take together are ones further from a universal understanding of truth, or selflessness, or community.
“In-between songs”
This is where Big Thief come in. Taking the stage unhurriedly, the band offer no gimmicks, no distraction techniques, just sound, story, and honesty. While worsening polarisation means we cut ourselves off from the transformative qualities of change, Big Thief are a band that wants to shift, and a band that will shift before your very eyes.
Adrienne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and touring bassist Joshua Crumbly wordlessly acknowledged the importance of their four-night Brixton run for a total of 20,000 people in a city in crisis by doing what they do best: Showing up, hearts extended. That’s all.
“We’re going to play some old songs, some new songs and some in-between songs,” Lenker’s soft-spoken lilt shared with fans in one of her only addresses of the evening. Another, later, would be in response to one of the evening’s only hecklers, a returned “I love you!” with a smile and a guffaw. The art-folk ‘Simulation Swarm’ made an early appearance, as did the crooning-coo of ‘Vampire Empire’ and the aching Lenker solo tune, ‘Real House’.
Fans often turn to the shimmering, diaphanous blend of cosy folk and introspective lyricism as an easy means of escapism. In Big Thief’s case, Lenker’s fixation on autofiction invites our own deliberate reflection because it almost anonymises our own pain to ourselves, like a way of taking all your clothes off in front of a window with the certainty that nobody can see you.
“In two days it’s my birthday, and I’ll be 33, that doesn’t really matter next to eternity,” she sings on ‘Icomprehensible’, and we are able to exactly situate ourselves against her own poetic experience before the soothing, pinch-me absolutism, “Everything I see from now on will be something new”. Lenker’s specific experience grants the listener alleviation from their own endless relationship with themselves.
In a live setting, wherein the musicians respond to one another with complete familiarity, these theoretical ameliorations become tangible. In perhaps one of the most moving moments in my recent memory, Lenker sang ‘Anything’ all-but acoustic, a soft suggestion of her guitar the only other sound in the room. Everything stood still. Almost imperceptibly, a tall man to my left burst into tears. Her voice took on an otherworldly quality, the moment persisting long after it had passed.
Escape the same way you entered
But it’s not all tears and sighs and fairy dust; Big Thief are angry, too. We’ve been contending with the fucked-up forces of the ruling elite for so long that our means of sonic escapism now bear the hallmarks of the emotions we wish to evade. Almost one-third of the set consisted of new songs, which is unsurprising, given that avid fans will know the Brooklynites shared last year that they’d finished another, more unpredictable, album alongside Double Infinity.
Lenker’s guitar rattle burst into guitar solos that unravelled the delicate core of the gold-spun singles. New track ‘Mr Man’ swarms with sourness, while ‘Pterodactyl’ charges obstreperously with renewed vigour, despite the draggier, grungier guitar. Big Thief have taught us that softness and peace can bring us freedom, and now, they suggest that discomfort and agitation can do the same. It’s a message I cling to, only hours after deeming London a complete lost cause.
Collaborative at their core, for the band created Double Infinity in partnership with ten different session musicians, Big Thief welcomed multi-instrumentalist Laraaji to the stage for their encore, whose wordless vocables so effervescent on the album is tenfold transmorphic here, as their three-track run of ‘Words’, ‘Los Angeles’ and the slowed-down, simmering ‘Incomprehensible’, a salve for the hellscape outside the front doors.
If it wasn’t clear enough already, Lenker repeats it for all to hear: “We love you, we’re together”. A reminder that giving up on this, something bigger than yourself, is never an option. It’s the exact message that will save London from itself, and perhaps the world at large.
