• Big Thief at the National Stadium, Dublin

    March 1, 2022 - By 

    Carrying five albums in just seven years under their belt, Big Thief weigh in at the endearingly well-worn National Boxing Stadium with the towel very much not-thrown. Following warm-up act KMRU’s opening platform of ambient environmental sounds the stage set-up is minimal. Additional instrumentation of fiddle, jaw harp, and piano featured on Big Thief’s latest album are nowhere to be seen tonight. This is a group with full confidence in the intimacy and connectedness of its core membership. Adrianne Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek are at opposite ends of the stage. James Krivchenia’s drums are positioned centrally and he is…

  • Big Thief – Two Hands

    October 21, 2019 - By 

    Two hands is the second album from Big Thief this year, following the sublime U.F.O.F. back in May. Despite such a brief interval between both albums, these “twins” reside in polar geographies; the former fixating on voyeuristic distance and disconnection, while the latter roots itself in a close and uncomplicated familial structure. There’s a desire for domesticity in Two Hands, which manifests in multiple ways, but is accentuated in the way the album was recorded almost entirely live, save a few overdubs. Bringing this raw, marked sound together with multi-faceted lyrics to explore internal uncertainties and societal grievances, Big Thief harness intimate…

  • Big Thief – U.F.O.F.

    May 2, 2019 - By 

    There’s a mysterious quality to Big Thief, their songs have a familiar warmth that feels as though they could be made up of melodies you’ve known for years, but at the same time they don’t sound quite like anyone else. This makes listening to a new Big Thief album an oddly nostalgic experience. On U.F.O.F, the band’s third album and their first on 4AD, there are moments when their sound feels like it could belong to an esoteric forgotten 1960s folk album, another Vashti Bunyan-esque rediscovery, while there are other times when the fragile timbre and turns of Adrianne Lenker’s…