The Olympia Theater was sold out on Easter Monday for the return to town of the American quartet Big Thief, author of one of the best recordings of this year still young, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. And in the room, we felt the warm breath of said dragon, the orchestra last night favoring the orchestrations of electric guitars and its distorted delusions to the country-folk-rock eclecticism that characterizes the brilliant double album released last February. Like a beacon in the storm of decibels, the strident and feverish voice of Adrianne Lenker, leader and main composer of the group, which monopolized all our attention.
The concert had already started over an hour ago when, just after Big Thief had surprised everyone with a completely transformed version of the new album’s title track, the softness of the mandolin orchestrations replaced by muted chords of rock guitar accentuating the swaying rhythm of the studio version, a stage technician passed an acoustic guitar around Lenker’s neck.
There was something striking about the gesture: after an hour of inopportune interpretations, Big Thief took his foot off the distortion pedal for a moment. The recent album may well navigate between the exploratory rock of Big Thief’s debut and melodious folk (like the two solo albums Lenker released in 2020, Songs and Instrumentals), from the start of the evening, this performance was happily disheveled. Guitars connected or not, we recognize the intuitive and spontaneous musical nature of the group, which makes these new songs with their unpredictable arrangements so unique.
It was assumed. No violin, no piano, not even those touching and imperfect choirs coming to cajole Lenker on the magnificent Sparrow, offered shortly before the recall. This country-folk ballad had lost nothing to the change, notice: after these ten songs corroded by the lively guitar playing of Adrianne Lenker and her ex-husband Buck Meek (he too took advantage of the pandemic to offer a solo album, Two Saviorshis second), Big Thief seemed to open his arms to embrace the nearly two thousand fans gathered at the Olympia.
The dragon spat early, making the rock blush of Black Diamond (taken from Capacity2017), the guitars crashing into the noise on Love Love Love (from the last album) a little later, after Adrianne Lenker (who was saving her interventions with the public) recounted her first stay in Montreal, a road trip of four days lived at full speed when she was only sixteen years old. From the very long finish of Love Love Love during which Lenker made a din of feedback, the band melted into the magnificent, and equally abrasive, Shark Smile.
We had to expect to see the group transform, and its songs with it, from the studio to the stage, which is moreover a stage of this size. Clearly, Big Thief chose not to go all out like on their last album, instead exploring the energy of rock and the textures of electric guitars – which, incidentally, made the invitation to the ambient composer Kara-Lys Coverdale who, in the first part, flooded the room with dense and moving sands of sound.
In all this brouhaha, Lenker’s great melodies always had the upper hand, the musician’s voice imposing itself on the expansive playing of her colleagues. It was she who led the way and who offered the most furious solos, but let us underline all the same the formidable game of drummer James Krivchenia, producer of the album (who, of course, also launched a solo album last week, the experimental Blood Karaoke). Famous, this Krivchenia, always listening to what Lenker was brewing in his distortion pot, very creative in his playing, even more jazz, in spirit, than rock.