Review: Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

Defying convention in almost every way, the latest release and fifth full-length album from genre-bending powerhouse Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You — offers an impressive 20-track journey through surreal poetry, personal heartbreak, and universal questions of the human experience. The behemoth double LP released February 11th, 2023, on 4AD marks a significant departure from Big Thief’s previous work and has already received universal critical acclaim. Contrasting their 2019 release, which featured a standard four-instrument lineup, Dragon New Warm Mountain brings forth an exceptionally eclectic instrumentation (fiddle, accordion, flute, synthesizer, pedal steel, piano, and “icicles,” to name a few), creating an extremely textured and unpredictable sound. Self-produced by the band’s drummer, James Krivchenia, the album showcases the varied songwriting style and skill of front person and creative driving force, Adrianne Lenker. The result is an album spanning numerous genres, achieving a sense of authenticity in each one. Weaving together head-first dives into rambunctious country-folk, old-school rock’n’roll, aughts-era indie, and familiar acoustic folk akin to Lenker’s more understated solo work, what the album lacks in sonic continuity, it more than makes up for in thematic resonance and musical mastery.

Unlike the band’s previous releases, Dragon New Warm Mountain was recorded in different locations with different engineers, creating an extremely disparate sound throughout the record that, surprisingly, doesn’t feel overtly disjointed. In line with the band’s vision, the album succeeds in highlighting the musical force and (sure, I’ll say it) genius of Lenker’s songwriting. One particularly stunning moment comes at the transition from “Blurred View” to “Red Moon.” While the former is a downtempo, lo-fi stint of hypnosis equal parts Broken Social Scene and Amnesiac-era Radiohead, the latter hits like a euphoric jam session between Neil Young and Emmylou Harris, complete with some rather chaotic whistling and Lenker yelling, “That’s my grandma!” as guest Mat Davidson (Twain) breaks into a harried fiddle solo. The less than five second break between the two songs made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. Admittedly, the break makes way more sense on vinyl, as it marks the division between LP1 and LP2.

By nature of its wide-reaching sound, the album is impossible to pin down with a single genre descriptor. Acoustic folk tracks like “Promise is a Pendulum” and “The Only Place” feel more reminiscent of Lenker’s solo work. Others, like “Dried Roses” and “Spud Infinity” — a borderline joke track that, like all good comedy, perfectly toes the line between humor and insight — speak to the inspiration Lenker draws from classic American poet-songwriters like John Prine and Townes Van Zandt. Predictably enough, the album also features quite a few indie-inspired tracks, including the title track, “Heavy Bend,” and “Little Things.” The latter in that list is one of the album’s most exciting tracks sonically, driven by bright electric guitar, ecstatic drums, and swirling vocals. If you have a car with a working stereo, I highly recommend taking a drive while listening to this song.

Thematically, the album poses a compelling, timely, and almost terrifying question about life, death, and what it actually means to be human. The album’s opener, “Change” (a song I will climb out of my grave one day to argue is one of the most simply perfect folk songs ever written), is about the importance of embracing death (literally and metaphorically) to fully experience life. In the first line of the chorus, Lenker sings, “Would you live forever, never die?” Then, in the very last line of the album’s final track, “Blue Lightning,” she sings, as if in response to herself, “I wanna live forever till I die.” Maybe there’s something to be said here about our yearning toward endless life and simultaneous rejection of the messy stuff that actually makes life up — decay, heartbreak, confusion, loss, death. Maybe there’s an inextricability there that Lenker wants us to pay attention to. By escaping death, do we inadvertently rob ourselves of the opportunity to fully live?

Held by this over-arching theme, we’re then carried through meditations on intimacy, heartbreak, feminism, presence, and transformation. It’s hard not to see the album as a personal process for Lenker. She’s asking herself the hard questions as much as she’s posing them to us, and she’s doing the work of facing change and death in her own life. But while (or rather, because) Dragon New Warm Mountain navigates the extremely personal, it never loses its relatability or universality. The track “No Reason,” a clear musical through-line to the band’s previous work, seems to speak directly to the experience of navigating a relationship during a pandemic lockdown and the hopelessness that can result when a couple is forced to sustain a connection through pixels on a screen (“Been pulling through/since the last time I touched you/Making do/with an internet signal”). Several tracks on the album (“Heavy Bend,” “12,000 Lines,” “Little Things”) paint a picture of a person in love with someone who lets them down, arguably one of the most universal human experiences of all. Yet, the song’s final love song, “Love, Love, Love,” suggests a distinct reemergence from the ashes (“I already died/I’m singing from the other side”).

While each song on the album creates its own unique universe of sound, a subtle thematic cohesion holds them together. Lyricist Lenker does not stray from her central questions regardless of whether she’s accentuating her vocal twang over the springy percussion of a jaw harp or whisper-singing over a synthesizer. Plus, it can’t go without noting that along with thematic continuity, Lenker’s rare, characteristically warbly vocals lend a great deal to the album’s consistent and recognizable atmosphere. As listeners, we flow through a landscape of vivid imagery, strange humor, varied genres, and layered sounds, almost not even realizing that we’re somewhere familiar: the terrain of our own messy, confusing, heartbreaking, hilarious, and finite lives.

Undoubtedly, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You will appeal most of all to established fans of Lenker and Big Thief, and there’s a chance that those who are more drawn to the band’s electric output (a la “Not” from the 2019 release Two Hands) might feel let down. The beauty of an album with this much variety, though, is that there’s bound to be something for everyone somewhere amidst its whopping 90 minutes.

Despite all its wandering, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You never loses sight of itself, up to the last word. There’s a quiet intention and cunning in the band’s decision to retain the post-recording chatter at the end of the last track, causing the final uttered words on the album to be, “What should we do now?” While one could interpret this as nothing more than a behind-the-scenes glimpse, I see it as a continuation of the album’s bigger message about time, change, and the passage of all things. This album, like any other, is one moment in time, a fleeting experience among many. All things lead to whatever comes after (“Change/like the wind/like the water/like skin”), and I for one can’t wait to hear what Big Thief decides to do next.