During one particularly great video from Philadelphia’s Johnny Brenda’s in 2017, Lenker’s guitar cuts out during the first chorus. The version of “Shoulders” on Two Hands is the definitive take, though you can see its spirit in every live performance. “It’s in me/In my veins.” Her voice sounds genuinely desperate, anguished, like she would rid herself of it if she could. “The blood of the man who’s killing our mother with his hands is in me,” she sings. Lenker, who once noted that she is often both the attacker and prey in her own songwriting, finds its gospel not by rising above her circumstances but through succumbing to her complicity. Like a dark analog to Bruce Springsteen’s “ The Promised Land” or the Mountain Goats’ “ This Year,” it gains power from its folk simplicity: a plaintive melody and a chorus that snowballs with a momentum that seems physical-part promise, part prayer. “Not” sits at the heart of the record with “Shoulders,” a stunner that’s been in the band’s live repertoire for years. Best of all is “Not,” a fiery exorcism that merges some of her most explosive imagery with a climactic guitar solo the desperation in her playing feels like a string of cries interrupted by shallow, gasping breaths. “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection,” she sings in “Forgotten Eyes,” her voice breaking at the word “ needs.” “Talk to the boy in me/He’s there,” she begs in the closing “Cut My Hair” as the music cuts out from underneath her. She’s written songs in the past that dazzle with poetry (“Mary”) and others that are memoiristic in their precision (“Mythological Beauty”), but these are pared down to just the most crucial bits of dialogue and wisdom. Big Thief were built for moments like these, where sound merges with meaning, where the floating voice in your headphones finds its body.Īs a lyricist, Lenker has become newly adept at telling stories through her absences. In “Forgotten Eyes,” a heartland rocker whose lyrics might be about homelessness, she trembles uneasily toward the final chorus, holding out the “ng” of “tongue” until it makes a phlegmy, growling noise in the back of her throat. Other times, she sounds like someone clawing at her own skin, trying to escape. Occasionally her lonesome, quivering voice feels like an outsider descendent of country-folk singers like Kath Bloom or Iris DeMent, particularly in “Replaced,” a co-write with Meek. Variations on the word “crying” appear in half these songs, and each time Lenker sings it, she tells a different story. And when they do cut loose, you feel the thrashing. In sparer, creeping moments like “The Toy” and “Cut My Hair,” you can sense the band listening to each other, responding with reassuring hums and nods. The accompaniment from Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik, who plays a few solos in “Those Girls,” is more understated but just as crucial. The focus is on the patient interplay between Lenker’s guitar-rhythmic and physical, like a slot machine with infinite outcomes-and James Krivchenia’s drumming, as patient and instinctive as it’s ever sounded. The record proceeds along a bell-curve, with the heavier moments at the center reverberating through the quieter points on either end. After the spacious odes to the natural world on U.F.O.F, Two Hands is a record defined by these collisions-a reminder that intimacy isn’t just about the comfort we bring to each other but also the proximity to our sickness and pain, blood and guts. “At this point we’re basically touching each other,” guitarist Buck Meek recently observed about their magnetic live shows, a connection made literal on the new album cover. But their own interpersonal dynamic has followed an inverse trajectory. Since their 2016 debut, Masterpiece, each successive album has felt like a breakthrough geared for larger spaces. It’s a trick that these musicians have spent their careers perfecting. The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound. The approach is best known for accentuating a tough, ragged cohesion, like Neil Young records in the ’70s, but this record goes somewhere different. It makes for a specific kind of rock record: an attempt to capture a band’s imperfect, raw essence, to show what happens when they simply count to four and take off. There are few overdubs, and sometimes you hear the band members instructing each other when to step back or take a solo, like they’re just rehearsing for the actual performance. Nearly every song overflows with tears and blood, bared teeth and broken tongues living, killing, dying.
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