INDIE EXCLUSIVE GREEN VINYL

For their fifth album, Big Thief offered up a sprawling double-LP (Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You) that spanned styles and moods but, like a playlist, consisted almost entirely of structured, melody-forward songs. The album was a hit, marking their first appearance in the Billboard 200 Top 40. The follow-up finds the group stretching out in a different and more surprising way. Their first album to be recorded without founding bassist Max Oleartchik, it finds the remaining trio welcoming in collaborators not only from the Brooklyn indie scene but from the jazz and avant-garde worlds, including the multifaceted Laraaji (Brian Eno), percussionist Caleb Michel (Afro-Cuban All Stars), and, on bass, Joshua Crumbly (Terrence Blanchard, Kasami Washington). While Big Thief are no strangers to sounding loose and live on tape, the resulting Double Infinity is easily their most improvisational album yet, even recasting Adrianne Lenker's voice as a vamping instrument on occasion. It's also their most meditative and psychedelic record yet -- and that's saying something because U.F.O.F. was pretty trippy. This is not to say that it doesn't sound like Big Thief, as they've at least ventured into similar territories before, and it was engineered, produced, and mixed by longtime collaborator Dom Monks; but there are no counterbalancing indie rock or real folk bops here, and the liner notes credit instruments like tape loop, tablet, drone, and zither in addition to their more standard palette.

Double Infinity starts off with "Incomprehensible," a rock song that's both driving and spacy, and guided by a rambling Lenker narrative that's punctuated by echo. That song is followed by another drugged-out psych-rock track, "Words," before "Los Angeles" grounds the set list in less-processed, harmonized folk-rock (singer/songwriters Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger contribute backing vocals to the album). With only nine tracks in all, Double Infinity nevertheless feels epic in its own right by the time it passes through the somnambulant, seven-minute "No Fear," a song injected with howling feedback and spectral backing vocals; the jammy Laraaji feature "Grandmother"; the circular anthem "Happy with You"; and the tambourine-accented singalong "How Could I Have Known," which seems to parade, jongleur-style, around the festival site. While Double Infinity is an album more likely to wash over listeners than stick, its collaborative, impromptu spirit has infectious qualities of its own, and it's interesting to hear that the band expanded outward instead shrinking with the first departure of a member.

A1        Incomprehensible
A2        Words
A3        Los Angeles
A4        All Night All Day
A5        Double Infinity
B6        No Fear
B7        Grandmother
B8        Happy With You
B9        How Could I Have Known