Tag Archives: ufof

#1440: Big Thief – UFOF

Leave a reply

I can tell you one thing AI’s good for on Spotify. It can tell me the exact date I listened to Adrianne Lenker’s Abysskiss the first time. 23rd January, 2019. Sounds about right. I liked it straight away. Of course I had to do some research of my own, and what always came up was that Lenker was the lead singer in this band called Big Thief. Sounded cool enough. But I don’t think I went ahead to listen to any of the group’s albums. Capacity would have been their latest one at the time, released a year and a few months earlier. Maybe I should have done. But Abysskiss kept me steady for a period of time. It was only about a month on from January 23rd – 26th February – that ‘UFOF’ was unveiled as the new song from the band’s forthcoming third album of the same name. Can’t remember where I found out about it. Maybe Pitchfork, maybe the Indieheads subreddit. But now there was no better time to listen to Adrianne Lenker in the context of “her” band. I listened to the song, thought it was interesting. I think I returned to it a few days later and realised its genius. Like Spotify says, it was “the song I kept circling back to” in March 2019.

The track’s only three minutes long, a suitable length most would agree. But it feels really busy in that runtime. James Krivchenia’s drumming never really sticks to one beat. It might do for a few seconds before he throws in a fill and a pitter-patter here and there. The rhythms always shuffling and evolving. Throughout Abyskiss, Lenker’s playing on the acoustic guitar reminded me of Nick Drake in that she also has this intricate fingerpicking style that somehow creates unique respective melodies, alternating between the lower and higher strings. That’s all over ‘UFOF’. Plus the overall chord progression is so mystifying, probably down to an alternate tuning of some kind. Then during the instrumental section before the final chorus, there are all the glitchy, stuttering vocal effects added just to add a little strangeness to everything. You can’t quite pin everything down, yet the whole track sounds so tightly constructed. Andrew Sarlo, the producer, once uploaded the song’s ProTools project onto YouTube for a video, showing all the layers and elements within. I saw it the one time. It was taken down at some point. It would be nice to see it again one day.

The extra ‘F’ after the ‘UFO’ in the title stands for ‘friend’. Any longtime readers may be aware of the fact that I’m more the “music first, lyrics later” kind of person. And before now, I never really thought about the words in this ’cause I enjoyed the melody so much. But looking at the words, it looks like the song’s another in the work of Lenker’s that concerns an admiration/fascination for a person that’s close to her. Only this time round, the person is unnamed – compared to a ‘Haley’ or ‘Mary’ or ‘Betsy’ – and they seem to take off and go on their own separate, wandering journey, much like an unidentified flying object. But Lenker sees the beauty in this being and dreams of the both of them going away on these journeys together. It’s beautiful stuff. A little aside, there’s a continuous ‘ting’ that occurs every few seconds in the track. I don’t know if it’s a triangle or a cymbal of some kind. Once you notice it, sometimes it’ll be the only thing you’ll be able to hear. I’ve been able to tune it out. But there are those days when the only thing in the song I can focus on is that ‘ting’. Apart from that, this track is one of the reasons why U.F.O.F. is my favourite Big Thief album. There are so many other songs on there apart from the other two that would have got posts on here. They exist in another universe somewhere.

#995: Big Thief – Open Desert

1 Reply

Big Thief’s U.F.O.F. got its fair share of critical acclaim upon its release in 2019. But looking around on various threads and websites I witnessed something more of a mixed reception. Some really liked the album, others found it to be more middling. It didn’t go anywhere. The record didn’t possess the more dynamic performances that were abound on Capacity or Masterpiece. It came across as an Adrienne Lenker solo album more than anything. I’m paraphrasing, though these were just some of the things I saw. Reminds me of the whole perception behind Pavement’s Terror Twilight. And just like that album is my favourite of that band’s, U.F.O.F. is number one on my Big Thief ranking list. Sleek-sounding laidback albums to vibe to always get two thumbs up from me.

‘Open Desert’ is one track from the album that I like quite a bit, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone comment on it anywhere. YouTube doesn’t allow comments on official music uploads, so there’s no way to tell. If there’s a song on the record that highlights the production sheen that’s threaded throughout, it might just be this one. The track goes along at something of a midtempo, light twinkling guitars and ambient synthesizers take up the soundscape joined by chimes of a xylophone here and there. And there’s a great intensity of warmth during the choruses where Adrienne Lenker’s harmonies come in on both channels. Production begins to feel very full in a subtle way, before releasing and returning to a more relaxing vibe to the verses.

I don’t know what the track is about. The title doesn’t appear in the lyrics, though they appear to be poetic and vivid descriptions of actions, motions, various thoughts and feelings, and observations Lenker made at some point in time in an inspirational setting. Some allusions to death in there too, possibly. By the “Through the mirror, mountain view” line, I’m going to guess that at least some of the words were thought of during a long drive. Maybe that’s where the title comes from. This is all speculation. In the end, what matters is how I feel about it all. My blog, after all. Despite what you might read on forums and threads – might take a while, this album’s been out for more than three years now – this album isn’t boring. It’s not gonna rock your socks off, no. But it’s solid, well-produced and memorable material. You can find that in this three-and-a-half minute number.

#665: Big Thief – Jenni

1 Reply

It seems that ‘Jenni’ is not available on YouTube to listen to, neither as its studio recording nor a live performance. I’m sure not everyone who reads this uses Spotify; I do, so that’s how I’ve linked it above. Sorry to those who don’t use it.*

Big Thief are probably my favourite band at the moment. It’s quite lucky that I only started listening to them at the beginning of this year and since then the group has released two great albums, both of which I can’t shake off, and have continued The first of them, U.F.O.F., was released in May. Two Hands followed over a month ago. I’ve witnessed comparisons between the two, as there were guaranteed to be some, and have seen that many people – by ‘many’ I mean a few comments on the Indieheads subreddit – seem to prefer Two Hands. I’m still listening to the songs from U.F.O.F. quite frequently though. While Two Hands is raw and quite naked in its production, the fullness and warm tones of its predecessor always get me going. I have a thing for chilled out, laid-back albums.

I was in a state between slumber and wakefulness when listening to U.F.O.F. for the first time on its release date and distinctly remember hearing ‘Jenni’, thinking how sort of heavy it was in comparison to the other eleven tracks on there. A millisecond fake-out clip begins the track, but when that first hit of the bass drum comes in with the guitars for the actual starting point it was like no moment of any other. On ‘Jenni’, it really sounds like the band were just in a large room and feeding off each other to produce this slow burning energy.

Unlike the majority of other songs on the album ‘Jenni’ has moments where the band just freak out, allowing moments of guitar feedback to ring out and rampant string bends to dominate the sound. Snippets of backwards cymbals glitch in and out of the mix as a swirling wall of sound reveals itself during the choruses. There are these brief occasions of dissonance during the verses that can add a speck of creepiness to the overall tone, but it resolves itself in the beautiful release of each chorus where songwriter Adrianne Lenker sings the track’s main refrain.

Who ‘Jenni’ is is a mystery, the answer to which only Lenker probably knows. The lyrics don’t leave much to try and pick out. Despite their simplicity, they’re still evoke vivid imagery of what is being described in each verse. The narrator – probably nervous, having a panic attack, unable to sleep, could be anything – sees Jenni – a friend, relative, spirit(?) – who then relieves the narrator from its anxious state by taking it through a mystical portal to an unknown destination. It’s like a strange, and very short, children’s story where what is occurring in the song is much darker than how it’s read.

This song is at the top of my ‘On Repeat’ playlist of ‘songs I can’t get enough of’ on Spotify right now. Everytime I hear it it’s like I’m sinking into my chair or whatever I’m comfortably positioned in at the time. A definite highlight, for me, from an album that I can’t stop listening to.

*At the time of writing this the song was not available on YouTube. That changed not too shortly after.