Album Review: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You by Big Thief

It feels like Big Thief were born with the keys to the castle gripped tightly in their fists. The band's imperial phase -- that untouchable period where it seems impossible for an artist to make a wrong move, creating music that feels unreasonable, unattainable -- started more or less when they did; their robes a rotating jamboree of hole-riddled overalls and repurposed fishing gear, furs and silks disguised as billowing T-shirts. And now, as is customary of any good imperial phase (and sometimes a harbinger of its end), we get Big Thief's Big Album.

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2019 wouldn't have sounded the same without Big Thief's double contribution of U.F.O.F. and Two Hands. Both not only established the quartet's reputation as incredible songwriters, but also cemented them as masters of channeling location to create distinct atmospheres (U.F.O.F. and Two Hands were recorded in the Pacific Northwest and Texas desert, respectively).

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If anything, Big Thief and its members are prolific. In just over five years, the group has released four albums, including two in 2019 alone. Over the same span of time, vocalist and songwriter Adrianne Lenker has released three solo albums, guitarist Buck Meek has released two of his own, and drummer James Krivchenia has appeared on a who's who of almost every other indie artist's records.

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Indie rock luminaries release the definitive anti-statement. If there's any band fully primed to release a year-dominating, career-summising, discourse-creating double album of their signature brand of raw, vibified indie rock, it's Big Thief. It's hard to think of another band in the game who've earned the cultural capital and goodwill - through years of hard work, sheer consistency and critical acclaim - to ask fans to buy in on an album like Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, with its hefty ante and unclear payoff to those still skeptical of Big Thief's distinctive charms.

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Receiving critical acclaim for their 2016 debut record Masterpiece, the band redefined the folk-rock genre with their infusions of lo-fi vocalisations and wistfully delicate guitar melodies. Now, returning with a handful of new cuts in tow, the quartet are back with their most ambitious and length release to date. Coming in at just under two dozen tracks, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You offers a momentous journey through the collective hive-mind of Big Thief .

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Innate, "god-given" talent is a merciless, inherently unfair reality of human life. Hard to identify, and even more impossible to quantify, we find ourselves scrambling to underpin the ridiculous achievements of our fellow humans with some kind of reasoning or scientific explanation. Someone wins more gold medals than anyone in Olympic history? It's because they're an anatomical freak of nature.

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Photograph by Jessica Viscius Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief Big Thief's new album, their fifth, eases into view with a tune called "Change. " It's a woozy three-chord shuffle, the kind of song you can imagine being sung around a campfire, its well-worn truths about the futility of trying to keep things the same offering a degree of solace. The song acts as something of a mission statement for this double album, prepping the listener to expect the unexpected.

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