was drenched in distant reverbs, Two Hands is dry and close. This twin business may sound like it's one step away from healing crystals, but as is often the case with Big Thief, look twice and the band is onto something. The band calls the record "the celestial twin." Two Hands is "the earth twin." is filled with encounters with the unknown, the strange and distant: UFOs and other people. It sounds misty and dark, a Northwestern transmission of twelve largely downtempo songs, layered with synthesizers and voices in the background.
That album was recorded in a converted barn in the woods of Washington state, and is the band's lushest work to date. Which in turn makes "Mary," and by extension the album, all the more cathartic in its soft celebration.The band released U.F.O.F., its first record of 2019, in May. "What did you tell me, Mary / When you were there, so sweet and very / Full of field and stars you carried, all of time / Oh, and heavens, when you looked at me / Your eyes were like machinery / Your hands were making artifacts in the corner of my mind."Ĭapacity spends a lot of time ruminating on scars - how they're made, how they fade, how we learn to wear them comfortably. At five and a half minutes, it unfolds deliberately until a dense cluster of evocative words comes spilling out: There, Capacity takes several stunningly warm turns - most notably in "Mary," a love song to an enduring friendship. In "Watering," "Mythological Beauty" and elsewhere, Capacity's flashes of violence are rendered in bloody poetry, leaving the album's back half to do the business of healing and adjusting. "Shark Smile" paints a vivid picture of a doomed drive, but instead of indulging in road-song clichés, Lenker prefers to linger on illuminative details - "the money pile on the dashboard, fluttering" - en route to a trip's bad end. These are songs lush with detail, dotted with matter-of-factly dispensed places and proper names (Evelyn, Andrew, Mary, Haley), and yet they're also abstract enough to retain an undercurrent of mystery.
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