GutterPutter

Adrianne Lenker, essentially the face of the indie folk rock band Big Thief, has enjoyed a notable career as a singer-songwriter. Since 2014 after an 8-year hiatus from her debut album, she draws some acclaim over her thoughtful and oftentimes intimately well-articulated narratives. She’s no Joni Mitchell although many would argue that she’s on an uphill tread towards greatness thanks to her 2020 opus songs and Big Thief’s beloved 2022 hit in Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. The sizable favorability that Lenker has received for her works would therefore set high expectations on her most recent release as a solo artist: Bright Future.

Compared to the other releases at this time like Waxahatchee or Kacey Musgrave, Lenker initially leans more toward the use of piano to weigh in the themes of time passing by. ‘Real House’ takes on the anecdote where Lenker contemplates her mortality in the stream-of-conscious account of her past. Minimal in its instrumentation and production, the clarity given to the songwriting helps to hammer home the memento mori through the climatic comparison of the vaccination and the euthanasia of her pet dog. In contrast, ‘Sadness as a Gift’ is beautiful in how it evokes the use of seasons to portray the end of a relationship through the gorgeous language and meshing between the strings and the guitar. A phrase like “You could hear the music inside my mind / And you showed me a place / I’ll find even when I’m old” will surely leave you a bit teary-eyed. ‘Already Lost’ tries to provoke the sense of nostalgia that feels as strong as ever even if you have only an abstract sense of what a loved one is.

Bright Future succeeds in its masterful presentation of nature as being comparable to the sublime, a notion that feels straight out of a Romantic poem like William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The likes of ‘Candleflame’ and ‘Free Treasure’ does not shy away from the pantheistic subtext of the outdoors as being innately spiritual or holy. The frequent second-person reference to what initially seems to be a friend or relative would run secondary to the ultimate desire of being as free and at peace as the rivers and the moon. ‘Cell Phone Says’, as an inversion of the former two songs, sees the use of gentle fingerpicking be set to the story of a long-distance reunion that feels neutered by the lack of physical connection. Lenker’s wavering voice does sell you on the prospect of the relationship potentially coming to an end which does make it feel more heartbreaking. A more on-the-nose companion piece in ‘No Machine’ celebrates the kind of love that is transparent and in tune with the natural.

The way that romance is presented in the album is also fascinating in the ways that it plays with pronouns and semantic inference of poverty, breaking down grand gestures in favour of cold, harsh truth. ‘Fool’ shows the contrast between the fantasy of being together and the subtly unsettling possibility that much of the comments made were escapism from general dysfunction. Under the shimmering banjo, it is one thing to picture the garden growing as you get old together. That is romantic in itself. It is another to contrast with the idealised portrayal of the relatives living the rural life only for some names to be mentioned as having a “clown on [their] arm” or how some are going to “flip” or go on a “dip”. Meanwhile, the Camilla-esque ‘Vampire Empire’ portrays a kind of love life that hinges on co-dependency and implied gender dysphoria. Its upbeat performance comes off as being dissonant and it makes for a much more  enticing listen. For a slight change in tune, the backing male vocals that is found in ‘Donut Seams’ is comparable to Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon which calls for an amicable separation through “one more kiss to last the years”.

The use of piano could occasionally veer into bits of melodrama, but Lenker’s use of the instrument through Nick Hakim as one of the session musicians truly shows the sentiments without verging into hyperbole. For one, ‘Ruined’ saw one of the most devastating depictions of longingness for this year as the reliance of the chords draw your attention to the slight layering of the vocals. Much like the apparition, there exists the self-destructive obsession that would potentially damage the life of the narrating voice and that makes the track feel all the more haunting in its own way like a warped waltz. Meanwhile, ‘Evol’ deliberately plays with toxic love through literary brilliance. Each three lowering note followed by a high note for the 4/4 time signature paves the way towards how several of the lines rely on the words being reversed to set up how a bad relationship leaves an unforgettable lesson on the complexity of ethics. More akin to chamber pop on some accounts, the two songs were among some of my favourites in the whole album.

Thus sets the significance of Bright Future as one of the top records of this year. While the lack of production expansion might leave a bit of a sour taste for those who want it to be more than an elaborate piece of poetry, I feel that Lenker does her job very well. It might not have matched the Shakespearean glory of Joanna Newsom nor does it truly set the standards of lyricism like Bob Dylan. What Lenker does truly excel at is making her work heartfelt and while there are times where her projects might feel excessive in the attempt to have that quota be met, it strikes the heart with a bang. Fans of albums as a substitute to literary collections will see this as a treasure to behold.

4.7/5