Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (studio album) by Big Thief

A simple and beautiful album. A mix of raw, emotional production, and complex and interesting lyricism. A fantastic folk record with all kinds of twists and turns to keep you interested until the end.

“Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You” is a broad display of Big Thief’s talents. The band is very skilled at changing between their styles. Indie rock, folk, and alt country tracks appear next to each other without feeling out of place. Lenker adds a lot of personality to the song writing. It’s elevated by little quirks like the yelp on “Little Things” or the enthusiasm of “That's my grandma” on “Red Moon”. Unfortunately, these pleasant details are swallowed up in the pure mass of tracks. Between the 20 whole tracks, the charm lessens and the ear fixates more on critical qualities. The commitment to the verse chorus verse structure really wears down the sharpness. It would have greatly helped to throw in an instrumental or try more breaks. A pleasant album but in need of refinement.

From Cargusbralem 12/27/2022 15:11

As bloated and unmemorable as the album title.
Simulation Swarm is very good and maybe a couple others, but it's a very patience-testing listen.

From HoldenM 11/15/2022 22:43

It's a lot of album. Even after a handful of listens, I can't say I've fully gotten my head around it, but there's a lot of beautiful songwriting and performance here.

Album of the year so far for me. It's a weird mix of melodies with vocals that suit the background. Very good indeed

What a collecton of beautiful melodies. The instrumentation is also quite interesting. Obvious contender for AOY.

A very ambitious project from Big Thief that shows a huge amount of potential but I don't think they have reached their absolute peak yet. You can see the group growing in quality through their albums and they just keep going up and up with this new release. This is primarily due to them being more comfortable with introducing more diverse and experimental instrumentation. This makes for a more rich, grand and in depth record that gives us so much to listen out for. A few examples of this are the use of the fiddle, piano, accordion and flute. Then there is the vast array of guitars used as well and the outstanding bass and percussion performance. They still have quite a lot of room to improve in this department but the slow introduction of more instrumentation is brilliant. The vocal is amazing throughout even though on a few tracks it takes a bit of time to get used to but it still blows me away once I have adjusted to it. It is an extremely unique voice and fits the style perfectly. There are also quite a few songs that can be picked out and be seen as phenomenal. However, the issue with this record is the elongated run time. It doesn't need to be an hour and 20 minutes and that makes the music feel so bloated. Also, the sound gets very repetitive by the time we reach the close of the record and I am ready for it to finish by about the 50 minute mark. Overall, a release that shows brilliant potential that should be realised on later releases but this still has some fantastic moments to enjoy.

A sprawling epic and perhaps Big Thief's most ambitious project yet.

From Brad1770 07/13/2022 05:38

Even by Big Thief’s lofty creative standards D.N.W.M.I.B.i.Y is quite the remarkable double album being one of those rarest of rare double album beasts where the quality rarely dips from top to bottom which at no point leaves the listener bored. This is because the variety of musical gene’s traversed and instruments used is simply breathtaking. Take for example -

- Accordian
- Fiddle
- Pedal Steel
- Flute
- Congas
- Tambourine
- Brushes
- Harmonica
- Synthesizer
- Jaw Harp
- Piano Shaker
- Fretless Bass

Being just some of the tools credited on this album

And its so awesome to see BT finally getting the wider recognition they so richly deserve

From lleon79 05/21/2022 21:27

Expected something pretty different based on other material I had listened to from Big Thief, but I really enjoyed this one. My favorite albums recently have been extremely long projects with diverse sounds and a bunch of hit-or-miss songs, and this is just right up that alley.