Dragon New Warm Mountain is an Equally Literary Experience As It Is Auditory
By Nia Tucker
Lucille Clifton’s poem “being property once myself,” reads:
being property once myself
i have a feeling for it,
that’s why i can talk
about environment.
what wants to be a tree,
ought to be he can be it.
same thing for other things.
same thing for men.
In Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, lyric comes across as biblical levels of truth and human observation of faults and imperfections. But Lenker and Co. let us know that that is what makes us beautiful. The band decided to make the album in the Summer of 2020 according to Pitchfork, in an attempt to “embrace” spontaneity. And it does. Their usual folk, pastoral sound, blends with surprising tracks guided by a synthesis of acoustic with drum pads and mainstream bass sounds. This all culminates in an album reminiscent of Fourth of July fireworks hitting suburban pavement and shooting into the sky above grass and wheat fields on the outskirts of town.
The album opener, “Certainty,” a song released earlier last year as a single, is a delicate track with Buck Meek and Adrianne Lenker’s signature whimsical writing style. Lenker sings, “My certainty is wild, weaving / For you, I am a child, believing / You lay beside me sleeping on a plain / In the future.” It sets the tone for the rurality of the next 19 tracks of the work and the ways that it plays with life, death and time travel.
Last year, track 7, “Little Things,” became a stand out during its release as a single, as it stayed true to the folk sound of the band’s previous albums, but was unique in that its sound becomes an experience of a genuine campfire jam-out roundabout as depicted on the album’s cover. There is a genuine nature that oozes from it, the guitar, bass and raw percussion sounds mix together and often overpower one another for an experience that sounds entirely like an improvisation—an explosion of the reunion of Big Thief coming together again in excitement for new music and rediscovery of human collaboration.
After “Little Things,” the band takes on an entirely new approach, creating 3 more electronic tracks, “Heavy Bend,” “Flower of Blood,” and “Blurred View.” The songs are distinctly darker than the rest of the more uplifting and nostalgic rock and folk-heavy tracks that surround it, but reflect an internal dialogue that must have occurred during the album making process where while reveling in the joy of new, there was a remembering of the past and a mark of loneliness that isn’t as apparent in other songs. “Heavy Bend,” the shortest song on the album, hits with a pang introducing the shift in the album, a repetitive harp sample tracing along the song with a steady but bassier drum sound. Lenker sings, “You were sleeping in / With the window open / The blanket breathing / Cigarette on a golden ashtray.” It comes across as an observational poem, reflecting on the stillness and brevity of life and the calmness of the presence of her lover—a microscope zooming in on intimate details to take in a moment to breathe before moving on.
Other standouts include the airy title track carried by Lenker’s famous breathy tone, and “Simulation Swarm,” a rich, more production heavy song that reads like a fable of animals, humans and time coalescing into a mass of revolving energy. The third to last song, “Love Love Love,” begins with an unintelligible yelp from Lenker, and dissolves into a song of existential dread and gluttony as she starts off singing, “I already died / I’m singing from the other side,” and ends chanting “love” over and over to a lover that has an insurmountable hold over her autonomy and body.
With Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Big Thief have created a fairytale of a shapeshifter, of community, of flashes in the pan and deep heavy breaths of clarity. They have embodied Clifton’s determined claim that “what wants to be a tree, ought to be he can be it,” and ensured that we have an allegory in each track for every experience we must sustain as human beings.