While Big Thief have never been afraid to let their lyrical narratives unfurl like luscious red carpets for the Queen of Hearts, this is perhaps the band’s most musically expansive release.
The songs contained within the gatefold are all wonderfully mystic, too, creating a sub-genre of modernist magic that feels at once beguiling, refreshing and, ultimately, evolutionary. It is a bonafide cornucopia of delicately crafted folk-rock brilliance. The record is not only long, a whopping 20 different songs are stuffed into the LP, but it is packed to the brim with a kaleidoscope of influences, inspirations, styles and sonic structures. This is one record that is perfectly encapsulated by its lengthy moniker. The old saying goes that you can never judge a book by its cover, but perhaps we can make allowances for those wishing to take a call on Big Thief‘s new album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You using only its title as a guide. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You – Big Thief That may sound like a grandiose statement, but with Harding’s latest effort arriving when Britain has been bathed in the glorious spring sunshine, it’s hard not to be wistful.
No, Warm Chris is the kind of vibrating warmth and confounding comfort that makes good novels great and leaves one with a sense of enrichment for having caught the end of a sunset.
This is not a reference to some smarmy-faced indie-kid or a crooner with a shit-eating smile and too much pomade in his hair, nor even the kind of “charming” a British aristocrat could drop like an atomic bomb of appalling insult. As, for the most part, her latest album Warm Chris can be summed up in one word: charming.īefore we go any further, it’s worth defining exactly what charming means in this instance. Well, for that notion of sadness spreading across the face of New Zealand’s folk-psyche hero, Aldous Harding, I am sincerely sorry. When you spend your career as an artist creating wholly unique pieces of expression, then to have a music critic provide a single word definition for the recent iteration must feel entirely depressing. White takes this as an opportunity to break out into bold, stylistic avenues, carefully designing his vocals around the pummelling hooks, his voice shrill, singular and soaked with a casing of soul. The highlights are nominally the instrumental ones: brisque, bucolic, and bristling with fire, invoking the Led Zeppelin records of his youth, albeit with a production style that is distinctly White’s alone. Where Blunderbuss and Lazaretto threw in splashes of flourish, the majority of the pieces here are standalone instrumental workouts, billowing listeners with a series of blistering guitar hooks. Jack White returns after a nearly four-year hiatus with the explosive Fear of the Dawn, his most ambitious solo work and arguably his most impressive display of songcraft since his days fronting The Raconteurs. Expect to see entries from Kendrick Lamar all the way through to Katy J Pearson as we highlight the best and brightest that 2022 has had to offer. Either way, what we are left with is a run of 20 amazing records from the year so far.