Big Thief, Safe in the Hands of Love
by Mateo Rispoli
I can but hope at my final event of ghastly acceptance, by the grace of the tangible light that shines upon them, that God, the universe, or whatever being we live under, on, or with, delivers me in the way Big Thief delivered Two Hands.
Two Hands, the Brooklyn band’s second release of 2019, is the earthly counterpart of May’s celestial twin U.F.O.F. (2019). The two projects are fraternal twins, baring similar features rather than production textures. Both albums show signs of interaction in the womb, however. The younger grew black hair instead of a gentle hazel, inviting wide blue eyes instead of baggy green pupils floating in bloodshot whites, and a gapped set of teeth she never reset as to not lose character.
The songs of Two Hands all share a closeness despite the near-15 seconds of silence that separates each. Whereas U.F.O.F. concerned itself with setting a spacious stage for its songs to take form on, Two Hands embraces the listener closely. It leaves behind the production techniques of its predecessor for a raw, untouched presentation. On Two Hands, the band itself barely fits in the frame of the album art, whereas on U.F.O.F. they lounge in the middle of a field, photographed from 10 feet away. Instead of the over-the-phone comforting, “you don’t need to know why when you cry,” Lenker sits in fetal position, stolidly letting tears down her face. “Plug into anything, I am unstable, cry with me, cry with me” she implores on Two Hands opener “Rock and Sing,” hanging on the “unstable” for an extra beat. Sedate and content, it waltzes the album to the middle of the floor you’re crying on.
Intimacy tints the Big Thief discography; submission to the beautiful world of another person, autobiographical accounts of its undoing, the healing power of touching; the coming together, the tearing apart, and the primal, Lenker explores to all stages of human contiguity. On Two Hands, however, she finds the greatest strength in collectivism. She questions whether she's “becoming more hollow” as she passes by homelessness on the streets, decrying herself for “quickly passing by, and the poison is killing them, but then so am I.” “Shoulders,” a live mainstay since 2015, reads environmentally, as Lenker laments “and the blood of the man who's killing our mother with his hands, is in me, it's in me, in my veins.” No one human is culpable for their indifference to others and the shoulders of their motherly host.
“Now you call my bluff, all clear and it gets so rough” sings Lenker on the title track “Two Hands,” trembling “rough” through her icepick falsetto. Musically, it’s a counterpart to “U.F.O.F.,” with arpeggiated finger-picked chords, an optimistic chorus, and a memoriam of a relationship past rather than the question and fear of an ending one. Buck Meek’s slide whistle-toned solo flies like a balloon propelled by its escaping air. U.F.O.F. provides the questions, and Two Hands posits that there may not be any answers and there may be comfort in the lack. In tune with the closeness of the recordings, many tracks focus on the phantom offspring of loss.
Lenker is a mischievous specter, subtly knocking over objects to send a message before losing patience and wildly swinging every door in the farmhouse and crashing the bookshelves against the aged plank floors. “Not,” the bursting heart of the record only defines itself through such an answerless growing impatience. The band eschews the ruminative structures of U.F.O.F. and build upon a two-winged foundation of emotional vocal crescendo, and a subsequent instrumental reckoning. She preaches negation, “It's not the room/Not beginning/Not the crowd/Not winning/Not the planet/Not spinning,” her voice crackling like coals of a campfire threatening to explode and set the forest ablaze.
As 2019’s last gasps peter and fart through the degraded flapping nostrils of the 2010s, Two Hands represents Big Thief playing out the decade on the top deck of a Titanic-esque final bow. If U.F.O.F is both figuratively and musically about space and the seclusion it brings, then Two Hands take things back to the crusty shoulders of our most intimate friend, the Earth.