Big Thief - Capacity

Rating:

Striking beauty and pointed lyrics.

Adrianne Lenker is an old soul trapped in a young body. She has certainly seen plenty in her 25 years, giving her enough stories to make a lifetime’s worth of material. From growing up in a cult to getting seriously injured by debris from a makeshift treehouse, Adrianne’s life is full of colour and challenges – and these experiences lend themselves perfectly to Big Thief’s homespun folk-rock.

‘Capacity’, the follow-up to 2016’s appropriately titled ‘Masterpiece’ is another raw and powerful collection of songs, intimate and sparse but possessing a wonderful storytelling narrative.

It should come with a health warning too; no album from 2017 is quite as emotional. ‘Mary’, a train of consciousness piano ballad, is almost cinematic in its breadth, but so striking and haunting it’s a challenge to hold the tears back. It’s not a song for repeated listens on public transport…

Elsewhere, the exceptional ‘Shark Smile’ emerges out of incidental orchestration to add some much-needed drive to an album that rarely gets above a muted hush. Likewise, the title track is an off-kilter indie-rock jam, driven by a left-field, almost ramshackle, arrangement that puts Adrianne’s gentle vocals on centre stage.