While the Big Thief guitarist’s solo work makes more room for American country music than his main band, it offers much of the same warmth and whispery intimacy.
Buck Meek sings a bit like someone who didn’t expect to find himself singing. When the Big Thief guitarist opens his mouth, he comes off slightly hesitant and bashful, not entirely committed to the pitches or the rhythm. He sounds like he might be singing just over your shoulder, so even when he lets a little goose-honk crack disrupt his voice, he’s appealing and warm. His solo work carries much the same whispery intimacy as his main band, even if it lacks some of the intensity.
Two Saviors follows Meek’s self-titled 2018 solo debut, which was released in the gap between Big Thief’s second and third albums, 2017’s Capacity and 2019’s U.F.O.F. Somewhere in this time, Meek and Big Thief’s leading force, singer-songwriter and guitarist Adrianne Lenker, quietly divorced. Their marriage was never much spoken of in the press, nor was its dissolution: “I feel like it made us stronger and closer,” Lenker told the New Yorker. “A lot of our love is funnelled into the music, which is maybe the form it was always meant to have.”
The songs on Two Saviors glow with some of that transposed love. They have the customary ease of folk rock, of course—save for drummer James Krivchenia’s experiments in electronic music, most of the Big Thief projects fall under the same homespun umbrella—but they also have the intimacy of a love letter written to a former flame. “Remember the time/You snuck in through the bathroom window and waited for me there?” Meek asks on “Pareidolia,” the album’s first song. The words don’t trouble themselves to make much literal sense, but now and then he’ll ask a direct question, charged with love and its loss: “Did your eyes change? I remember them blue/Or were they always hazel?”
The instruments all seem to step lightly over each other, the drums and Rhodes and pump organ tangling around the edges of the downbeat. Meek makes more room for American country music in his arrangements than Big Thief does, from the expert pedal steel on “Cannonball! Pt. 2” and “Candle” to the Sun Records boom-chicka of “Two Moons (morning).” The whole album sounds like it just spilled out of a junk drawer you pulled open looking for something else, and the spirit of the Grateful Dead, or at least a couple of their T-shirts, drapes lightly over the proceedings.
Meek and his band tracked the album over seven days in an old Victorian house in New Orleans, with no second takes. The rickety house infuses the album with so much room tone it nearly deserves a credit in the liner notes; it’s easy to close your eyes and envision the drafty stairwell ceiling in the distortion-clipped drum track of “Ham on White.” This is very comfortable music, but Meek threads strange disturbances into its weave. Residing alongside the blankets and stars and blue jays of his lyric sheet are darker things—faces forming on the ceiling, broken tongues, swimming pools full of turpentine. He sums up his brand of gentle uncanny nicely, on “Second Sight”: “If you have a need of which you can’t describe/A feeling of the third kind/That’s my specialty.”
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