Triumphant: Big Thief, at Green Man, reviewed

One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra percussionist; the bassist has been replaced; and the singer is now front and centre. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people mutter. Have they lost the intimacy they once had?

I’d never seen Big Thief before, which is something of an error on my part. Not least because I can’t answer those questions: I have nothing to compare Saturday night’s performance with. I can only say that without caring about what they were in the past, they are extraordinary in the present: both grand and welcoming.

Earlier this year I wrote in these pages about Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief’s singer and principal songwriter, when she performed solo at the Barbican. Her songs, played on acoustic guitar, were spindly and fragile things. With a full band – there were two drummers, Lenker and Buck Meek playing guitar, and a bassist – they became wonderful clockwork mechanisms, the guitar lines spiralling around each other, the two drummers interlocking.

Big Thief play in the genre we might loosely call indie folk, which is awash with sensitive people being sad about stuff. Lenker, too, is sad about stuff, but she’s a fantastic lyricist, at times opaque, at times direct, with a gift for images that root her songs in time and place: ‘Watching TV tired, bleeding on the bed/ The milk has just expired, all the leaves are dead,’ opens ‘Vampire Empire’.

What’s appealing about Big Thief on record is the clatteriness of it – as if it is somehow degrading even as it is made. They can be simultaneously ramshackle and precise, and the two drummers added to that, keeping the songs both loose and bouncy: James Krivchenia, the principal of the pair, proves the truism that a good band needs a great drummer.