Just as the lonesome, echoey ambiance of Emmylou Harris’s 1995 album Wrecking Ball represented a career-shifting break from country orthodoxy for the Americana legend, Big Thief’s Double Infinity sees Adrianne Lenker and her band shedding their usual ragged, rustic style in favor of a more polished, atmospheric approach.
Like a less moody “Deeper Well,” the album’s lead single, “Incomprehensible,” is all glassy, droning guitars and yearning, canyon-echo vocals. As a standalone track, it opens up an evocative and fresh new lane for a band that was in need of one following its expansive 2022 double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.
But while this new aesthetic suits Lenker’s keening voice, it often feels too slickly sedate across an entire album for a band whose charm has always been tied to its off-the-cuff intimacy. Now a trio following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik, Big Thief doesn’t need to be noisy to succeed: The spellbinding, pastoral quietude of 2019’s U.F.O.F. remains their best work.
Double Infinity’s languid, pillowy palette muffles Big Thief’s spontaneous energy. When Lenker chants on “Grandmother” that she’s “Gonna turn it all into rock ‘n’ roll,” it feels unintentionally ironic. On the closing track, “How Could I Have Known,” the band does attempt to rekindle the chummy strum-around-the-campfire vibes of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, but with its fussy strings, the song ends up sounding hokier than anything on that album.
While Double Infinity’s production style may erect a new layer of detachment around Big Thief, Lenker’s songwriting is as skillful and vulnerable as ever. Her songs run the emotional gamut from the playful “Happy with You” and the ecstatic “Words” to the brooding “No Fear” and the serene title track. And as always, she doesn’t shy away from getting deeply personal. On “Incomprehensible,” for example, she invites us to help her inventory “some stuff I left when I was a kid” and begs, “Let me be naked alone with nobody there.”
Lenker, then, isn’t putting up any walls, much less putting on any clothes on “All Night All Day,” in which she implores: “All night, all day/I could go down on you/Hear you sing your pleasure.” Double Infinity’s arrangements lamentably don’t match the rawness of Lenker’s lyrics, but as long as the content of the songs remain this nakedly visceral, Big Thief will be fine no matter what musical path it chooses to follow.
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