Effortless audacity: Big Thief on tour

Sage Gateshead – 05/04/23
Usher Hall, Edinburgh – 06/04/23
Manchester Apollo – 07/04/23
The Great Hall, Cardiff – 08/04/23
Hammersmith Apollo, London – 11 and 12/04/23
Chalk Brighton – 13/04/23

There is a song that Big Thief have recently started playing called ‘Born for Loving You’.

If you want to understand it, there is a simple, biographical way. And then there is another way.

The simple way first: when the band’s frontwoman, Adrianne Lenker, was a student at Berklee, her music showcase betrayed the powerful influence of the husky, highway-fixated alt-country chanteuse, Lucinda Williams, right down to the very voice she was affecting. That influence hasn’t been as pronounced since (manifesting merely in the odd cover, with Lenker slipping back into Lucinda-voice), but as the band prepares to tour with Williams this summer, here’s a song – co-written with drummer James Krivchenia – that in its feel and its hook could be seamlessly snuck into Williams’ setlist. It may also be the straight-up sexiest thing that Lenker has ever sung (“Take me to the back of your pick-up truck,” she implores at one point, “show me a thing or two.”).

And now here’s the other way to think about ‘Born for Loving You’: no-one else on earth could have written this song.

‘After the dinos fell’: the world of Adrianne Lenker

In its first two lines, Lenker dispenses with the entire history of the universe up to her birth (“After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell/After the first light flickered out of this motel…”). That effortless audacity is characteristic. But the song’s conceit is not conceited: it is a way of understanding the magnitude of love. Everything that happened – to me, to us, to anyone – was just a prelude to this. From blood-soaked birth to teenage nightmare, via “waddling around, looking at birds”, well: “thank god we made it through.”

Dylan once said, “It isn’t me, it’s the songs. I’m just the postman, I deliver the songs.” And here is Lenker’s current online biography in full: “songs of all sorts from places unknown”.

The places are, admittedly, occasionally known. Across the seven shows on this UK tour, ‘Born for Loving You’ gets four airings: twice as a lush ‘70s California-style singalong, then as a plaintive solo ballad, and finally as a stripped-down full-band version with simple harmonies. For those last three, Lenker adds a coda: a falsetto snatch of ‘I Will Always Love You’ (Whitney version).

Yet even when the sources are, as she says, “unknown”, those songs come filtered through a unique sensibility: ideas are ingeniously inverted, images recur, motifs are endlessly shuffled. Her characters are gender-fluid, avian, feminist and quasi-biblical, traversing a world of blue skies, cluttered kitchens, bare plains and flat roads. Whether broken, fixed or flailing, they are loved.

And certainly she seems a conduit for whatever immortal music is floating in the ether right now, whether fragile or thundering. The most exhilarating part of following Big Thief on tour is the regularity with which miracles happen. “This is a new song,” Lenker will say, most nights, before playing the greatest fucking thing you’ve ever heard in your life. On the last tour, she composed ‘Wait a While’ on the ferry over from Dublin, performed it six times in concert, then retired it. It has never been released. Most musicians would kill to ever write a song just half as good.

But Lenker just keeps them coming. She begins the encore at Edinburgh with ‘Already Lost’, for which the word ‘timeless’ is barely sufficient (by the point she unspools the line, “How slow and how fast you are,” your soul has gone into spasm). She commences the second night at Hammersmith with ‘Sadness As a Gift’, which does for depression what ‘Change’ did for fear of death; turning your understanding inside out. She isn’t soothing you with song, she’s showing you another way of perceiving pain. While her between-songs badinage is regularly ridiculed by reviewers committed to the cheap shot, there’s something appealingly counter-intuitive about her worldview, about an artist who’ll tell a huge crowd that a mammoth show feels like a dream (so far, so banal), only to dazedly add: “I don’t really even mean career-wise, I just mean in general: it’s so bizarre to be a human being, and we all ended up here, right now.”

A live band who also make records

And here is where you want to be. You don’t know Big Thief if you haven’t seen them live. They are not a group you fall in love with at a distance: they are a live band who make records on the side; the intensity of their in-person performance rarely, if ever, transfers to your preferred streaming service.

Nor does its extremity. They continue to spread out in all directions, the quietest band on the circuit, and about the loudest. I saw them in Oslo last year during one of their particularly metal phases, an evening that did unspeakable things to my left ear. It is a decision I will never regret.

The live experience, gloriously, is never the same twice. That’s how I can justify seeing them seven times in nine days. Across those shows, they play 38 different songs, 14 of them just once. So if you want to hear their most popular song (‘Shark Smile’), a recent album track like ‘Blue Lightning’, or an unexpected cover of ‘Strangers’ by The Kinks, you’ll have to catch them in London, Manchester and Brighton. They start the second show of the tour, in Edinburgh, by playing four songs we haven’t heard the night before.

Every gig, too, has a different narrative, often built into the sweep of Krivchenia’s setlists. Edinburgh begins with that country-inflected singer-songwriter fare, before shifting into tortured rock, a sequence bookended by two absolute beasts: ‘Contact’ and ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain’. The former explodes into ugly metal screams; the latter continues to delight those who only know the gentle, balladic version that titled their last album.

That’s an emblematic number when talking about how their music continues to evolve, and how no Big Thief song is ever finished. At Gateshead – a curious, slightly muted show (presumably because it was largely seated) – ‘DNWM’ came galumphing out of the gate in a way that just made me think, “yeah OK, but we kind of did this last year”. The next night, it was reborn as a monster, and by Hammersmith, it had mutated into something unstoppable, the band adding more and more mad shit to it: a vocoder, a vocal-coda (Lenker’s drifting falsetto), and squalls of physically-induced feedback, Lenker turning her back on the crowd and throwing her torso at the amp. The song's opening line, "It's a little bit magic," is essentially now a public service announcement.

Not winning

Songs are in constant flux. While ‘Flower of Blood’ reaches its apogee on the first night – as if shoegaze died and went to Heaven, where the Shredding Festival was taking place – two of Lenker’s greatest songs don’t quite find their new place in the world until the final one.

‘Not’ often felt curiously tired, an incomparable song given oddly perfunctory treatment; and after glorious versions exhibiting the extroverted solo (2020) and the internalised one (2022), its climax here seemed technically impressive but hard to follow, either musically or emotionally. Manchester was an exception – Lenker beginning and ending the song on her knees, her guitar part suddenly pleading – while the first night in Hammersmith was an enjoyable anomaly in which she either forgot the words (not, ironically, for the first time) or just tried something new: a ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’-style semi-rap on the verses. It’s Brighton, though, where the song comes to life again in exhilarating fashion. It’s longer, unerring, precise in meaning, Lenker drawing a defining message of futility from its endless negation, as she circles back for a last chorus, screaming the words “not winning” over and again, like some apocalyptic benediction.

She ended both the last UK tour and this one with ‘Change’ – her song about life gaining its very meaning from the existence of death – and while the deeply moving solo version that closed the Shepherd’s Bush run remains the indelible one, her message best delivered by a single voice, the four-part harmony and falsetto ending of this new reading also reaches its full flower by the seaside.

Other songs have been completely reworked. ‘Spud Infinity’ continues its transformation from a wispy, metaphysical ballad to a showcase for a band at its happiest and silliest, complete with Jew’s harp, stomping and a sing-along. While ostensibly a country song, it’s also a jazz number in as much as it allows for showy improv, including guitarist Buck Meek’s characteristically weird anti-solos. ‘Zombie Girl’, another song that Lenker played as a haunting solo song at Union Chapel in 2019, is performed in Edinburgh as a seven-minute prog number with two guitar solos.

At other times, the emotions are simply dialled up. Lenker’s guitar-play is further spotlighted in a newly funky, swaggeringly cocky ‘Simulation Swarm’ that contains two killer – and subtly different – solos, while the cult favourite, ‘Sparrow’ (whose accompanying t-shirt has become practically a uniform for teen girls paying pilgrimage), escalates into tormented fretwork. Simply ditching her acoustic 12-string is enough to conjure up a different world of ‘Cattails’, as if rural America finally got electrified. And in ‘Certainty’, she effectively improves upon perfection by dropping onto a blue note on the pivotal word ‘wild’, an innovation that makes the song more – not less – certain; and irrevocable, without end.

Real love: a horror show

Manchester, probably the best show of the tour, offers a first outing for ‘Real Love’ (Lenker memorably responded to audience cries for the song at Shepherd’s Bush by murmuring, “I know that one”, and mock-innocently singing a bit of the chorus). It’s a blistering rendition, with an extended solo, a huge riff and a similarly huge performance, Lenker grasping glorious, frenzied at the falsetto finale. It remains one of her greatest and most deceptively important love songs: a haunting and seductive marriage of adolescent goth imagery and childhood trauma. This is love as illness, incapacitation, sudden death; a life sentence; a horror show; a beating; a curse, endlessly repeating – and who doesn’t want love?

There are also the moments when Big Thief drag out a deep cut, and drag you around to their way of thinking. I didn’t get the fuss over ‘Change’ until the final moments of last year’s tour. Adrianne starts the first show here with a beautiful solo rendering of ‘UFOF’ – despite twice forgetting the words – a song I’d never cared about at all, before the band blasts out ‘Blurred View’ in a version that finally makes the song make sense: hypnotic and insistent. Other apparent filler from last year’s mammoth double-album grows in stature over the nine days, ‘Time Escaping’ in Cardiff emerging lopsidedly gorgeous from bizarre tuning and improvised wordless vocals; the yearning ’12,000 Lines’ rising to meet the majesty of its cosmic sentiments; a finger-picked ‘Dried Roses’ finally opening up in London, rather than repeatedly shutting its door in your face. In Brighton, the band turn the thin pastiche of ‘Red Moon’ into a total winner, the song racing past and carrying you with it.

And then there are those new songs. Alongside the ones already mentioned are ‘Horsepower’ – a groove-filled metaphor about fucking, via Top Gear Driving Classics, Vol. 5 – an amiable solo number called ‘Bright Future’, and a pair of instant classics. The sensual, longing ‘Ruined’ is one hell of a choice to kick off your biggest show in four years, while the raw and imploring ‘Free Treasure’ sounds like Springsteen’s more talented sister knocking about in the back yard. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more,” Lenker sings, her voice breaking. Tell me about it.

Psycho-drama in Hammersmith

If the first Hammersmith show was, to me, the night she sang ‘Free Treasure’ solo (and the night I got to see my band with my best friend for the first time), then the second show felt more like a psycho-drama. In the 22 hours between, Adrianne had met up with her ex, and the band’s return to London had been damned with varying degrees of faint praise by the reviewers of two national papers. The armchair psychologist in me wonders whether that personal experience informed the quietly anguished elements of the show, while the professional brickbats inspired the setlist and the ferocious physicality. ‘Vampire Empire’ ended with Adrianne falling in tandem with the word itself, ending the song sprawled on her back; once up on her feet again, she took quite some time to compose herself for the repetitive, unrepentant, pseudo-cheery toxic ballad, ‘Happy with You’ (Krivchenia’s favourite Big Thief song). Incorporating ‘Masterpiece’ as recorded – rather than the conversational iteration performed the previous two nights – along with the only outings this tour of fan favourites ‘Shark Smile’ and ‘Mary’, this was the band’s version of a hits show, though they remain the only band whose hits show has four unreleased songs in it.

One of those is ‘Vampire Empire’, which – in typically offbeat fashion – Big Thief decided to showcase on prime-time TV, despite the fact it isn’t available to stream or buy. Whether that was 4D chess, agreeable iconoclasm or a mild form of commercial self-sabotage remains to be seen, but it’s looking increasingly like the former. Adopted as a Gen Z anthem, its spiky gender nonconformity (a preoccupation that found its most beautiful expression in Lenker’s 2016 song, ‘Paul’) might just boot them into the next level of rock stardom. Is it selfish to say that I hope not? I love this band, I don’t want to watch them in a large shipping container.

These spaces just feel right. In Cardiff, Lenker adapts her songs not just to her mood but to the acoustic peculiarities of the low-ceilinged Great Hall. After playing to 10,000 people across two nights at Hammersmith, the band could have treated the 800-capacity Chalk Brighton as a comedown; instead they embrace the intimacy.

Fashion rocks

When I wrote about the 2022 tour, I received two tweets that really stuck in my mind. One, from @roryisconfused, said: “I love that since I saw them 3 days ago, the bassist has dyed his hair pink.” Someone else, their name now sadly lost to history, wrote: “Each member looks like they’re in a different band.”

Last year, Lenker manfully continued with the solo to ‘Not’ despite the fact that what appeared to be a wedding dress was coming down around her. This time she has to negotiate the thrashing climax of ‘Contact’ with a green beenie having fallen down over her eyes. This band suffers for their art, but also occasionally for their fashion. In Gateshead, they are wearing: an untucked pink satin shirt and tall hair (Buck, guitar adornments); a silver jump suit and matching sandals (James, drums); a pale pink dress (Max, bass); a cut-off motorbike shop t-shirt, old black jeans and silver tooth (Adrianne).

Each has a stock expression on stage. Krivchenia’s mouth hangs open, as if in a drum-induced trance. Meek endlessly shakes his head, his front leg bent, a slim shoe pointing towards the crowd. Bassist Max Oleartchik greets regular deviations from formula by shrugging contentedly and giving it the big lower lip. And Lenker has three principal modes nowadays: eyes closed peacefully for a solo spot; eyes closed tormentedly for a howling guitar break; hopping from one foot to the other in a hoedown style when she feels the need to lighten up a little.

Her place on stage was always front right, but apparently a bad back has forced her inwards. Ironically, shifting to centre-stage makes her seem less like a solo act with some willing accomplices, and more like one of the band. She also seems younger on this tour, somehow. Maybe it’s the hair: a tomboyish tuft rather than the blonde buzzcut that made her look so otherworldly at Shepherd’s Bush. She was married to Meek, way back in the mists of 2015, and their dynamic remains hugely touching. For his part, he is possibly the most wholesome person on earth. In Edinburgh, he tells a story in his faltering southern twang about how as a child he stayed in a nearby castle where his grandfather – a dealer in antique coins – made the children a treasure hunt in which they had to find doubloons. Alright, Keith Moon.

Sadness as a gift

That gentleness extends to the whole band. Most nights, they spoil the big rock star reveal by shambling onto the stage an hour early to introduce the support act and ask the audience to be quiet and attentive. Lenker says in Hammersmith that it’s the part of the show that makes her most nervous. What I pretentiously took to be a delight in linguistic invention when she did it at EartH, may, instead, just be mere awkwardness.

But the vagueness that can beset that plea, or her chats between songs, vanishes when she sings, or writes, or plays. Her commitment to emotional truth habitually forces her to disrupt the band’s best laid plans by politely interpolating whatever song she suddenly feels like playing (you can think of their printed setlist as an interesting alternate reality). And it informs both the sincerity of her singing and the specificity of her songs. Even if the songs still come from ‘places unknown’.

In ‘Sadness as a Gift’, perhaps the most vivid example of Lenker’s ability to leap repeatedly between the everyday and the eternal, she addresses a lost lover. “You and I both know there is nothing more to say,” she begins, before saying it anyway, if only to herself. The song builds to a remembrance – or an offer? – of profound simplicity, as Lenker croons with a fractured strength: “You could hear the music inside my mind.”

I just feel privileged to live in a time when I can do the same.

***

With thanks to old friends and new on this tour: Paul, Jess, Jamie, Sorrel, Jordan, Chris and Orlando.

Setlists:

My pieces on previous Big Thief tours: 2020, 2022

Big Thief on tour

BIG THIEF at
Hammersmith Apollo, London (27 Feb)
Rock City, Nottingham (29 Feb)
Albert Hall, Manchester (1 Mar)
Ancienne Belgique, Brussels (5 Mar)
Paradiso, Amsterdam (6 Mar)

Every time you see Adrianne Lenker, she’s three different people. This month I’ve seen her five times.

It started like this. Last year I watched her enchant Union Chapel, picking at an outsized acoustic guitar, tooth missing, hiding behind a thatched fringe, whispering whimsical self-penned songs that seemed to be about potatoes but were suddenly about the cosmos. Four months later (two of which I’d spent in hospital), she played the Roundhouse with her band Big Thief, four disparate, perfectly and weirdly simpatico Brooklyn alt-folk scenesters.

She’d shaved her head and she was just screaming. Swaggering and screaming, guitar like a machine gun.

Later in 2019, her band played Bush Hall in one of those small miracles that London serves up now and again: announcement on Thursday, on sale Friday, gig on Monday, previewing their second album of the year, Two Hands, doing it in full for the-first-and-only-time, figuring out how to play these songs live, before our eyes, something between a workshop and a front seat to history. Since then they’ve been lauded by Pitchfork, the Guardian, and Barack Obama(‘s PR consultants), but it was how the shows made me feel. After Suede and the Manics gave way to The Strokes and The White Stripes, I thought I was through with bands – that really bands were the kind of thing you grow out of, like Ricicles or the Socialist Workers’ Party. Then The National came along and asked if that was in any way a tenable position. Big Thief set fire to it.

I had tickets to the London show, had the flyer magnet-pinned to my fringe for close to a year, but Big Thief aren’t a one-evening proposition. They’re mercurial and explosive, allergic to convention and setlists – to having a set list for more than one night in a row, even to sticking to the one drummer James Krivchenia has written – and seeing them just once suddenly seemed perverse. Like listening to Mahler’s Ninth once, enjoying it and then smashing the vinyl on the sideboard. Instead I could spend all my money going to Nottingham. And Manchester. And Brussels. And Amsterdam. Anywhere there were sympathetic Burins with fold-out sofas and an accepting attitude to turning up two hours early for gigs.

OK, I missed Glasgow and Paris somewhere in there, but the five shows were like a suite, or a Gus Van Sant film from back when he was great, and I’m left with this: a series of impressions, a juggling of snapshots, a succession of reinventions: the same but different, different but the same.



Hammersmith is first and it’s your erratic epic – their biggest gig ever, perhaps their longest. Big Thief are the only band whose singer’s hair is a continuing psychodrama of its own, and she turns up looking like Henry V. “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named/And rouse him at the name of Crispian,” says the grown Hal, and Lenker is a soul obsessed with home: the “good home” of ‘Parallels’, the home that everyone deserves in ‘Forgotten Eyes’, the home confused for a refuge in ‘Rock and Sing’. And this few, this happy few, this band of brothers so fierce in their gentle, sporadic, lolloping way: three men and this androgynous tour-de-force, Lenker unshaven and muscular and suited, spinning tortured love songs that are, upon inspection, not love songs at all but explorations of the male selves that at times flicker to her forefront. “Oh, the last time I saw Paul,” she breathes in one of their debut album’s heartstopping moments, “I was horrible and almost let him in.”



There are concessions to commercialism, or at least pragmatism, in London, but Big Thief are still just so irregular and counter-intuitive, and weird, and heavy, and fey. Which other band would kick off a landmark show with a new song called ‘Zombie Girl’, played acoustic and solo? Which band would meet every ovation with a wistfully abstruse deep cut? Or consent to an encore (by no means a given) from a pissed-up crowd of 5,000, do only a subdued ‘Rock and Sing’ and then leave. They quietly reinvent the Spotify Top Songs stuff – angular guitars, drum-and-vocal bridges, rolling rhythms – but at that stage I’m just getting attuned to it. I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not like Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”



At Nottingham’s Rock City, bathed in blue, they manufacture atmosphere, then feed off it, swelling to twice their size (I’m on the front row now), pressing inexorably forward. “I love you, Adriana,” yells a male voice from the back of the room. Lenker scowls, says nothing. He says it once, twice, half-a-dozen times. She looks at her feet. It’s when two teenage girls begin to speak, freaking out at being in the same room with her that she engages. “I just love these songs so much,” says one, pushing her way forward, beginning to cry. Lenker, who’s crouching down over her guitar to fiddle with the amps, smiles, contorts her fingers into a thin and sturdy heart.

The show is intense, and in its intensity the tour’s themes start to reveal and congeal. You realise what a political record Two Hands is, with a directness that can only be communicated in person. ‘Not’ is an explosion of cathartic anguish, with something of Sleep Well Beast’s state-of-the-nation remit, a list song that exalts through endless negation, like Cole Porter just went fucking mental. Seen through the squall are Bible-old traumas and rampaging ills: climate emergency, consumerism, mortality, listlessness, loneliness. And at some point words are no longer enough, no matter how perfect the words, like when the harmonica comes in at the end of Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, and then ‘Not’ spirals into horror, madness, purposeful fury, and finally release; a howl, a blast of noise, a guitar solo that’s half-rehearsed, half-improvised, and by Amsterdam will be refined, Lenker no longer on her haunches, twiddling amp dials, but trading sonic perfection for picturesque rage, because the display, the physicality is part of the thing, if not the whole thing.



‘Forgotten Eyes’ is empathetic: a big hug, a socialist manifesto viewed through a hippy aesthetic. But ‘Shoulders’? That’s merely harrowing: domestic violence in primary colours, the sins of the father as anthem; at one point I turn half-around to see the whole crowd chanting in unison; it’s a definite moment, but it isn’t comfortable. In Manchester, Lenker will turn ‘The Toy’ into a stylised pantomime, her right hand a gun firing skywards as childhood play turns into misadventure, love transmogrifies into murder, and the horror of sudden, eyes-wide realisation twists America into an apocalyptic hellscape. But that’s not yet: here it’s just fraught and ugly. As these new songs flex their muscles, others are dragged into the present: the political present; the musical now – dragged upwards as the band degenerate into grunge. And then when it’s over, there’s just ‘Magic Dealer’, gentle as a sparrow in the dawn.

Manchester, though, is about those gestures. Lenker stretches out a hand towards the child by her side, before ‘Capacity’ turns introspective. She tracks a tear down her cheek. She fires the finger-gun. Birds fly away. And in ‘Masterpiece’s new, stompy segue, she clomps across the stage in black boots, facing away, the song as funky as it can ever get and still stab you in the heart. Because when she’s stopped playing at being the rockabilly George Clinton, she’s still got to go back to the mic, got to tell us that there’s only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.



She is avian. High cheekbones and a hooked nose. The wild, ethereal twitter of her head voice. And when she nods to a fast, burgeoning riff, ‘Shark Smile’ coming to life, her heads bobs and juts like a pigeon’s. Yes, she’s birdlike. Almost brittle. But her middle-range is powerful and her lower-range is brutal, and there’s such strength in this band. They’re pastoral and sensitive, but if you pollute that lake, they are going to fucking kill you. She handles her guitar like a feminist manifesto, and though it’s hard to find a new way of playing guitar live, rock clichés sit lightly on you when you’re a genius. Lenker moshes with a Beatle cut, backpedals as she thrashes out chords, delicately stamps her feet and shakes her head as ‘Forgotten Eyes’ takes shape, and screams as ‘Contact’ is made: the long, slow prelude, then skin touches skin, or metal touches brain, or a mind lurches awake, or somewhere in that vast empty blackness, something responds.



So often, her eyes are closed, and they flicker open to gaze into yours or just into the middle distance. She breaks sparingly but completely into a smile, into nervous laughter. There are thank yous, at times that feeling of being quietly overwhelmed that a band get when they’re suddenly big, but that comes only when they speak, and the spell of impetus slackens. In Brussels there’s a soliloquy about Europe. The cobbled streets… the beauty… wanting to go there, but feeling afraid. It’s not scary, though, it’s people, says Lenker – and stone. In Minnesota, everything was thin, but… no… there’s beauty there too, and she’s into ‘Cattails’, which rocks, but like a hand on a cradle, a part-cryptic bucolic lullaby, a deceptive 12-string dance track about the natural world, full-to-choking with beauty, in its imagery, its sounds, its meter. “And the clusters fell, like an empty bell,” sings Lenker, the rhythm so infectious that she’s proto-rapping. “Meteor shower at the motel.” It makes my throat swell.



She plays around with those rhythms, always. In ‘Mary’, her hypnotic, lulling fast-talking can either speed or drag, make the song lost and dreamlike, or else relentless and pretty; she injects urgency, uncertainty, certainty into ‘Not’. The freakout jams are different every night.

The setlist changes every night too, but there are runs of songs, and you get to know them. ‘Masterpiece’ into ‘Capacity’ – sad and sensual, spinning the heartbroken lover trope into bisexual erotica – then ‘Shark Smile’ and sometimes ‘Real Love’, that exquisitely painful smash-and-grab that takes one look at songs that glorify abusive relationships and decides that actually I’ll probably be alright, thanks – and suddenly you’re the kid watching his alcoholic mum get the shit beaten out of her by its dad. In Brussels, the poignancy almost drowns you, the “hummingbird” passage offbeat, strange and haunting, like it’s broken out of The Innocents: a quiet, haunting new song, the child’s song, suddenly growing out of this old one. In Amsterdam that’s gone forever, but the song is a monster, stretched out and violent. That show is the heaviest of the lot, ‘Shark Smile’ sped up, aggressive but still insouciant, its lust barely dampened by its auto-wreck tragedy.



Then there’s the acoustic stretch: for some of it the band take a back seat and, in bassist Max Oleartchik’s case, a literal one. ‘Orange’ is one of the loveliest, most straightforward songs Lenker has ever written – that’s played in London, then comes back for the Benelux gigs. There are new tracks: the conventionally attractive ‘Zombie Girl’; ‘Dried Roses’, premiered in Nottingham, which takes Lenker’s whimsical-metaphysical thing near to the point of parody but damn-near breaks you anyway; and ‘Time Escaping’, which eludes me still; I don’t remember it, nor how it goes. Maybe one day. She’s backed by the band for ‘Happiness’ – another list song, Lenker-style – for the rocky ‘Bruiser’, for the gorgeous ‘Two Rivers’, which meanders through familiar territory with an iridescent beauty. She picks a repetitive pattern over Krivchenia’s brushwork, voice scaling mountains of arpeggios, checking out the scenery, until finally she gets to the crux of it, words trembling: “Is it a crime to do what you ask me to?”

Krivchenia is a superb drummer, and his languorous expression – leaning forward, mouth lolling open – sets some sort of tone. He cracks one smile in five nights. Oleartchik – feet bare, clad in a pink onesie or a dress, often-times perched on a stack of amps – is unaffected, unobtrusive and unfussy, as if he’s scarcely realised he’s playing bass. And Buck Meek, extreme left of the stage, as Lenker is centre-right, has his knee eternally bent, slim shoes that feel like they should be winkle pickers, leaning towards her, towards Krivchenia, looming almost, lurching with those thin legs as he issues spare notes and shimmering soundscapes, but his talent sublimated to his group, with just the odd lead guitar part. And sometimes he’s scarcely playing at all, but fuck me those vocal harmonies, lifting ‘Mary’ and ‘Masterpiece’ still higher – and it’s only when he comes in, adding to Lenker’s voice, to Krivchenia’s, to Oleartchik’s, that you realise those sharply uptilted Texan vowels were what was missing. High forehead, hair like corn drifting back in a stack at the back of his head; guileless, polite, deceptively brilliant; when Lenker goes off, and yes she goes off, he instinctively complements her crackling invention, their chemistry absolute, and you think of that photo of them in front of the camper van on the front of ‘A Sides’, when they were a couple, perhaps halfway to getting married. In Amsterdam there’s even a rare concession to practicality, as he gets a solo spot, because he’s back later in the month as a solo supporting act, and he has tickets to sell.



So yes it’s a band, and if they ever split up, I will cry, but for all that it’s Lenker’s band. Walking on stage with wet hair, in high-waisted trousers, stripping off her suit jacket to unmask a sleeveless top – white or blue or khaki – after a frenetic guitar solo, an illegible tattoo snaking down her arm, she holds you for 90, 100 minutes in her thrall. She comes face-on to the audience just once, as ‘Masterpiece’ reaches its zenith; otherwise she’s off to one side, one of four points, but the driving force, content in her endless capacity. With three people, and three people herself.

***

Setlists: