Album reviews: Big Thief – UFOF and Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes – End of Suffering

Big Thief – UFOF

★★★★☆

Big Thief’s frontwoman Adrianne Lenker has an uncanny ability to make you feel like you’re in on a secret. Her whispering, spectral delivery and deeply personal lyrics are the key to this. Even on the band’s third album UFOF, with an audience that has grown exponentially in the past few years, the songs are still immensely intimate affairs.

The band’s instrumentation has progressed, however, and now ranges from the delicate acoustic picks heard on their debut – the aptly titled Masterpiece – to grungier and often Radiohead-esque tones that hum moodily on opener “Contact” beneath Lenker’s alien wails.

Elsewhere, the band have more sonic symbiosis with the North Carolina Americana of Hiss Golden Messenger than any of their New York-based peers, heard in the buoyant guitar lines of “Strange” or on “Cattails”, which is a continuation of the singer’s obsession with nature’s hold.

Often, Lenker offers the same kind of symbolic fatalism as the poetry of Christina Rosetti: “We both know/ Let me rest, let me go/ See my death become a trail/ And the trail leads to a flower/ I will blossom in your sail,” she sings on “Terminal Paradise”.

This deathly intrigue is drawn from Lenker’s own personal traumas, which she successfully spins into something that feels universal. But you don’t come away from this record feeling downcast. It’s more a reminder of how fleeting yet beautiful life is, and an appeal to make the most of it. (Roisin O’Connor)

Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes – End of Suffering

★★★☆☆

If “the end of suffering”, the Buddhist philosophy of enlightenment, is about accepting the inevitability of pain, then surely Frank Carter has achieved it with this album. His third release with The Rattlesnakes, written alongside guitarist Dean Richardson, could not be a more raw outpouring of personal turmoil.

Take “Anxiety”, in which the Hertfordshire-born Carter, who divorced last year and whose mental health struggles led to cancelled tour dates in 2017, lays it all bare. “I try my best but it’s never right/ And I don’t know what’s wrong with me/ Cos I should be sweet/ But I’m not happy”. Or the leaden “Love Games”, which nods to Amy Winehouse in its lyrics (“If love is a losing game/ Then why do we play it again and again…”), and in its soulful vocals, too.

Carter’s voice has never sounded richer and more tuneful, and these melodic heavy-rock numbers are a far cry from his beginnings in hardcore-punk act Gallows. “Heartbreaker” opens with pounding drums, distorted guitar and punk vocals, leading to a chorus that recalls Manic Street Preachers. This is Carter’s lunge for MSP and Queens of the Stone Age success.

But there’s more of Carter’s roots on display, on the sneering “Tyrant Lizard King”, or “Crowbar”. The latter is another energetic scorcher, its angry half-spoken vocals spilling over ferocious drums and pulsing, semi-quaver guitars; punk colliding with Kasabian-style anthemic rock.

We have to wait for the final, title track for the end of suffering. That Carter’s young daughter Mercy is on the recording ramps up the emotion and hopeful vibe of this acoustic ballad. It’s a much-needed resolution to an album of full-throttle catharsis. (Elisa Bray)