We see through a glass darkly here – it feels like there are a persistent vagueness and abstraction in the lyrics and some kind of gauze seems to have been draped over the instrumentation – and it’s fantastic. The listening experience is otherworldly from the start. And indeed the album does seem to oscillate, cat-like, between come-hither entreaties and fenced-off inscrutability. Friend, so this might be some kind of ET- phone-home-loving-the-alien situation, but on first glance, the acronym might also look a little less inviting if you are squinting and feeling the least bit insecure. We are informed that the title, “U.F.O.F.”, stands for U.F.O. This balancing act is achieved with great skill and deftness both musically and lyrically. He clearly did not anticipate Adrianne Lenker, who manages to combine reticence and passionate intensity in a synthesized bundle of Keatsian negative capability, where it is perfectly possible to live gracefully, even joyously, in uncertainty.
#Big thief lost masterpiece full full#
Yeats famously wrote in “The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, seeming to indicate in that jeremiad a complex of paradoxes where the worst of all worlds were obtained simultaneously. offers a solution which is neither a compromise nor a resolution, where indeterminacy becomes the theme and the mode of the work itself, and it succeeds brilliantly. If Big Thief has until now been operating within the pickle of an unresolved thesis and antithesis, U.F.O.F. It has been a fascinating dynamic, to be sure, but it has also seemed that at some point a decision might have to be made about the direction of the sound. This contrast can be seen as clearly as anywhere on the first two songs of Masterpiece, “Little Arrow” and “Masterpiece”, which alternate between those two apparently incongruous registers. Those two components are, more or less, a plaintive and often somewhat unsettling kind of folk music alongside or up against the counterpoint of a bigger, dirtier, rockier, fuzzy guitar sound. is a powerful synthesis of the two main components that both characterized and somewhat fractured their first two excellent albums, Masterpiece (2016) and Capacity (2017).