BIG THIEF – DOUBLE INFINITY: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
BIG THIEF
Double Infinity (4AD)
IF WISHES WERE HORSES, beggars would ride. You reckon? Well, ride baby, ride!
Yeah, I get it, if wishing could make it so, we’d be in some kind of paradise already. Joni knows I’ve been wishing hard for a good long while, so there’s probably a reasonable amount of evidence available to make a call on the success rate of wishing. And you’ll be shocked to hear that wishing it so hasn’t worked. At least not on what my economist friends would call a macro level.
(Yeah, fair call, I don’t have any economist friends. But I’m not averse to the idea. I’m open-minded that way.)
But on a micro level? Now that’s a different matter, and I reckon it works. I’m not suggesting it makes it happen – jeez, there’d be a few more premierships in the trophy room at Brookvale for a start if it did – but as a practical approach to living in the continual shit show that offers us Jacinta Price and the US Supreme Court in the same week, well, it sure beats the alternative of giving in.
And I reckon Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker thinks the same way. On Double Infinity she’s wishing for better – better people, better circumstances, better outcomes – and in doing so, finding it.
To clarify, wishing in this context is not merely hoping for something, or closing your eyes to its opposite. “Words are tired and tense/Words don’t make sense/Words are feathered and light/Words won’t make it right,” she says at one point, hosing down hippie dribble. But this wishing is actively wanting to find the good and seeing its first sprouts, watering its growth, and reaping the harvest.
It’s about putting some trust in people, leaving yourself open to them, enriching each other, in conversation, in exchange, in bed. “You scratch my skin to help me feel/Cause I ask you to/Reaching through the veil/Teach me, it’s you I’m learning.” It’s about saying, as Lenker does in the title track, that “I've been too long behind these walls/Inside this house, ignorin' calls/And time moves like the water falls/Unrelentin', cascadin',”.
And it’s about responding to this with “Beauty speak to me/Let me know you, let me see/Myself inside your mystery/Through the crystal cage of agin',”.
Mind you, wishing isn’t a synonym for deluding, or some excuse for throwing open everything to joy. That’s not how Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia (the playing and songwriting core now, with bassist Max Oleartchik having left) work.
While anything but a downbeat record, Double Infinity is not a going-big Big Thief album, nor does it appear to have as many melodic or musical hooks as we’ve seen before. At least that’s how it feels for a while, and I will admit I had my doubts. More than most of theirs, this takes some time to emerge from its attractive, mild-mannered, folk-inflected, mid-range rock setting and reveal itself to be something special, and some listeners will peel away after a few listens satisfied this is satisfactory but not essential.
However, as is her way, Lenker rewards persistence and in reasonable time (in non-instant-pop terms) you will find yourself immersed in a song like Words. Its rolling rhythm pulling you along with barely a tug, the confusing melange of sounds (instrumental and vocal) behind her voice feeling like a joyous crowd in which you can discern individual faces, the line “I'm walking down the street, humming this melody on repeat" accurately prescient, the whole experience warming.
Maybe you’ll glide along on a Bruce Hornsby-ish shuffle in All Night All Day, feeling like you are lying skin to skin as the voices seem to be. Maybe you will be dancing in the twilight ambience of Incomprehensible and drinking in the afterglow of How Could I Have Known.
Or you might just be sitting in the wordless carriage of Laraaji’s vocals in Grandmother, where he simultaneously counters and confirms the chorus line – and it is just one line, repeated – that explains how love and sky and pain and clouds and kissing in the car, will feed into the everything: “Gonna turn it all into rock ‘n’ roll”.
Adrianne Lenker would wish that for you.
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