The first handful of songs Big Thief played Tuesday night (January 31st) at Higher Ground in South Burlington, Vermont — including “Certainty,” “Dried Roses” and “Cattails” — set a comfortable vibe that permeated the venue’s ballroom. That folk-fueled warmth was welcome on a 9-degree night, as the band kicked off its monthlong U.S. tour (grab tickets here).
That warmth grew into full-on heat about a third of the way through the 90-minute set. The crowd roared at the first notes of “Masterpiece,” the buoyant pop-rocker that provided the title for the band’s 2016 debut album, which was recorded just across Lake Champlain from Higher Ground in Essex, New York.
The brightness of “Masterpiece” segued into the dark, punchy rock of “Not,” with its staccato lyrics (“Not the crowd/ Not winning/ Not the planet/ Not spinning”) and the jagged, angry guitars of Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek slashing with Neil Young-ish fury. Both songs hit hard, but with different approaches — a left hook here and a right uppercut there — and the night was no longer cozy and inviting. It was suddenly vicious and just a little scary, and that was all right, too.
That’s the beauty of what Big Thief has become in only a little more than six years and, prolifically, five albums. What started out as a sweet indie-folk-rock band led by Lenker’s rich lyrical insight has evolved into a multilayered powerhouse. Just give a listen to 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, with its 20 songs winding through fields of easy folk, percussive pop, jaunty bluegrass, jangly folk-rock and even flashes of trip hop and freewheeling New Orleans-flecked fun. The band smooths that blend like mortar between bricks, building a stout body of work.
Big Thief is also building a stout following. Tuesday’s show in a 770-capacity room will be followed in less than six months by a concert not quite 10 miles down the road on the grounds of the Shelburne Museum, an outdoor site with a capacity for 3,000 fans.
At Higher Ground, Lenker led the way with her rich lyrics that ask more questions than they answer, as on a new, untitled song the band played toward the end of its set (“Trying hard to figure it out here/ The center is a hole in the sphere”). Big Thief also played a beautiful version of the Dragon song “Sparrow,” which, with its dark imagery from nature and the Bible, evoked the apocalypse as much as it did the Garden of Eden.
