Big Thief, “Certainty”
Need to lie here, need to leave/ Living in the debt of make-believe
Big Thief’s string of fall singles culminated last month in the announcement of a double album, slated for release early next year, that will feature 20 of the 50ish songs the band wrote since spending two weeks in the Vermont woods last July. Lead singer Adrianne Lenker told Mojo that the sylvan fortnight presented Big Thief “freedom to just play, and be fuller versions of ourselves,” without the stresses of touring and city life.
When I played “Certainty” for my parents in September, my dad said, “Somebody’s been listening to Bob Dylan.” And on the one hand that’s just the kind of thing that dads love to say, but it’s true that the new singles lean even further into American folksiness than previous Big Thief projects. When Lenker sings, over Buck Meek’s twanging guitar, that she is “crooked as a crow gnawing on dawn,” it’s hard not to think of Dylan’s imagery on “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” his six crooked highways and black, bleeding branches.
But while freewheelin’ Dylan shifted from folk to rock (and beyond), Big Thief seems to be traveling in the opposite direction. The raw catharsis of “Not” and “Real Love” is absent from the new singles, which are alternately cozy and haunting. The stark pain of sorrow is replaced by a softer melancholy, a flickering doubt, Lenker’s voice more like a campfire than a breaking wave. The songs are more “Shelter from the Storm” than “Hurricane.”
Maybe I love you is a river so high/ Maybe I love you is a river so low/ I love you, still don’t know
That’s not to say the forthcoming project, yet unnamed, will be one-note. Big Thief has performed two unmistakably country songs, still unreleased, and Lenker says the album will also include “bombastic and wild” tracks, on top of the “serene, internal, and reflective” numbers that are already out. So maybe the band is syncing its releases to the seasons — for fall, scarecrows, owls, restlessness, tolling bells, changing leaves, and the fragile sweetness of love without a plan. I can’t wait to see what winter brings.
Adam Bos, GRISTLE
You might think that when the Bos brothers took a trip to New York, after months of filming in weathered Ontario parking lots, they would want to skate something smooth. Imagine how refreshing the ground at Borough Hall must feel after lockdown on pockmarked asphalt, how effortless a gliding noseslide at the Museum of Natural History. But no, there is no Borough Hall, no Museum, certainly no Chauncey or Stroud. The only spot I recognized from the short New York section in GRISTLE is the Williamsburg Monument, and the plaza’s main features don’t even appear in the shot.
Indeed, the trio brought the same crust-hunting mentality they’ve applied in their Canadian home province to the big city, seeking out needles to thread and soggy green benches to boardslide between. Less than a minute later they’re back in Ontario, skating every bank at Bayside Secondary School. It’s a perfect example of how to fold travel clips into a hometown edit without compromising aesthetic coherence.
The spots in Bos territory don’t feel like frequent session sites either, with perhaps the exception of the waxed barriers and yellow light pole wallie. I can’t imagine that anyone else has dared touch the ledge-to-chain by the train tracks or the lower guardrails of an ivy-backed walkway. This is in line with Adam’s previous work, which has been Quikcreting his position in the pantheon of spot hunters (like Lurker Lou, Jerry Mraz, and Joshua’s Politic teammate Shawn Mac) for well over ten years.
Through dedication to plumbing the beige depths of southern Ontario, paired with crewnecks, beanies, cloudy skies, and film burn flashes, GRISTLE achieves a nourishing quality, as if you could watch it to keep warm. It certainly doesn’t hurt that these guys are all brothers. And, oh yeah, the skating is really good too. ;)