Double Infinity’s title track begins with a Yeah Yeah Yeah ‘Maps’-like shimmer and is as gentle as a lullaby yet more rousing than 96.5% of national anthems, with a melody for all occasions. Festival singalong? You got it! First dance? Yes please! Tear-drenched farewell into the long unknown? It must be done. Adrianne Lenker sounds absolutely enthralled throughout as she reels off a series of grand images in tribute to love and life like W.B. Yeats shouting to his mates at the pub about the first time he saw the lake isle of Innisfree. “Beauty speak to me / Let me know you, let me see / Myself inside your mystery / Through the crystal cage of aging”. At the time of writing, it is not known how many poets have throttled the muse in jealous despair after hearing such heaven-piercing words.
Big Thief have been going for ten years, and I wish they could go on for a hundred more. Now a three-piece after the departure of bassist and founding member Max Oleartchik, Double Infinity is their sixth album. If this was album no. 60, the astonished praise and gratitude would still be a-flowing.
Album opener ‘Incomprehensible’ sounds like early REM except that the lyrics are entirely comprehensible. Lenker adds layer upon layer of landscape and memory like Springsteen in full flow. “Highway 17 / Cotton candy rain”; “Way up past the border / We blew through Thunder Bay”; “All across Ontario, static on the stereo / Went swimming in the lake – Old Woman Bay.” And then she throws in an absolute zinger like “let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair”. Poor redundant poets.
The skittering drums on ‘Words’ are core to creating a track that has the aura of a great evening about to begin, and yet the words are unsettled and oblique. Have you heard the ‘No Surprises’/What a Wonderful World’ mash-up? ‘Words’ is like that. ‘Los Angeles’ is a curious blend of precise topography, knotty poetry, and unabashed adoration. Lenker sings lines such as “amputated dimension of the physical” with the breezy joie de vivre of Dolly Parton singing ‘Jolene’, and the song ends in unfiltered joy: “I’ll follow you forever / Even without speaking / I can tell what you are thinking…/ We dream our dreams together / And you sang for me.”
‘All Night All Day’ is a somewhat subdued song about sex. After ‘Double Infinity’ comes ‘No Fear’ – a 7-minute, prowling, moody lyrical loop. “There is no time / Round like a lime.” It’s John Donne for the 21st century. Lenker is as comfortable describing the minutiae of the physical as she is with the vastness of the metaphysical. ‘Grandmother’ features the 82-year-old Laraaji on zither, iPad, and ‘intuitive vocals’, and the track ends with a mission statement: “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.” The lyrics for ‘Happy With You’ make a haiku look epic. Lenker is happy with someone, and that’s it – why does she need to explain herself? The band hurriedly and happily articulate her simple, pure joy like a caffeine-riddled Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
“They say everything lives and dies / But our love will live forever” – how is it that, on album closer ‘How Could I Have Known’, Big Thief make such a statement sound as refreshing as an ice-cold cocktail in Mykonos, as insightful as an Einstein equation, and as powerful as all the waves that have ever happened? We are truly blessed they’re here.
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Double Infinity is out now on 4AD
Review by Neil Laurenson