Live Review: Big Thief @ Princess Theatre, Brisbane

It was raining outside the Princess Theatre. Inside, Mess Esque were constructing the kind of perpetually dissolving-and-precipitating soundscapes that swelled and receded like the tide, gently lapping at the shore, gradually building in momentum. “I study the sunset,” Helen Franzmann sang, Mick Turner’s somnambulist guitar melodies wandering throughout the room, “leads me to tomorrow”. Following a dreamy pattern of images and associations, the duo teased apart linear perception, unravelling the phenomenon whereby one thing leads to another to the point where one feels like they could, to quote the title of the song above, wake up to yesterday.

Sometimes spoken-word, other times wordless, Frazmann’s singing style shifted gracefully from one mode to another, swinging moment-to-moment from the literal (dogs, birds, snakes, trees) to the abstract – “Life is but a dream,” she sang at one point (Dream #12), accompanied at times by touring bandmember Keeley Young on bass guitar and backup vocals. Listening to Mess Esque was a reminder that if life feels like a dream, it is probably simply because, when one pays attention, it is more real than seems possible.

Big Thief are in constant pursuit of the real, and the four-piece band wasted no time in getting to matters of life and death with their choice of opener, Terminal Paradise. “See my death become a trail, and the trailer leads to a flower / I will blossom in your sail, every dream and waking hour,” Adrienne Lenker sang to the reverently-hushed crowd.

Towards the end of the set, Lenker even improvised a hilariously-long, extremely-silly talk-singing monologue, thanking everyone for coming – explaining afterwards that she felt the need to do something new in order to feel that she could stay grounded in the present moment; the band are continually searching for a door to a place they have never been.

It is commonplace to describe a band as playing together, but rarely does observing a musical performance feel like witnessing actual play in the imaginative, exploratory sense of the word. Big Thief are an exception in this regard: they discover right in front of us, trying out new songs, forgetting the words, remembering the words, moving around the stage, singing without the microphone, improvising musical passages, and huddling tightly together at times to strengthen their musical connection.

Hearing their music performed live, it becomes clear that the recorded versions of their songs are simply snapshots, frozen in time, of the band’s seemingly-infinite capacity to refract the emphasis of these compositions in manifold ways – whether that be through James Krivchenia’s reality-redefining drumming on Flower of Blood and Not, Buck Meek’s ethereal, otherworldly guitar playing on Simulation Swarm and Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, or Max Oleartchik’s impossibly-light-footed basslines on Spud Infinity and Red Moon.

There is a funny thing that happens at Big Thief shows: the new, unreleased songs are, unexpectedly, always the highlights (the band performed two that evening – a big-hearted, country love song and another full of Gothic allusions to vampires and mermaids). While scientists are yet to explain this phenomenon, it is possibly something to do with the way that words tumble and fly from Lenker’s mouth like a kaleidoscope of butterflies and the overwhelming sensation of experiencing this for the first time. After almost two hours, the total accumulative effect was something akin to glimpsing the phantasmagorical confluence of all things.