That Naked Thing Swimming In Air

Big Thief “Rock and Sing”

Big Thief have a lot of excellent songs, but I think a lot of what has made them become a big deal this year comes down to people becoming fascinated by Adrianne Lenker and her baffling charisma. She’s strange and enigmatic without any perceptible calculation, and performs with a vulnerability and intensity that’s almost uncomfortable to behold in person. On stage she seems like she could be either 10 or 1,000,000 years old, and sings with a fragility that is starkly contrasted with the sturdiness of her guitar playing, which often makes me imagine the roots, trunks, and branches of tall trees. The music often evokes images of the natural world, and seems very old somehow, but maybe only because Lenker’s sentimentality and her engagement with the present is in touch with a lot of things that get filtered out of perception these days.

“Rock and Sing” opens Two Hands, the second of the band’s two records released this year. It’s a brief folk song that sounds like a sweet lullaby, but has lyrics that suggest a complicated relationship with one’s body and a desperate need for connection and stability. The melody is absolutely gorgeous but she’s not precious about it, and in a few spots lightly disrupts the meter of her words to get across the emotional weight of a line. Relative to other songs on the record, “Rock and Sing” feels tiny in scale, but the suggestion of extreme intimacy makes it feel like a hyper-concentrated dose of raw feeling.

Buy it from Amazon.