Lenker recorded Bright Future with accompaniment from Philip Weinrobe, her engineer and co-producer, as well as singer-songwriter and frequent Big Thief collaborator Mat Davidson, violinist and percussionist Josefin Runsteen, and alt-R&B auteur Nick Hakim. They did a lot of passing around instruments: The album’s basic palette is voice, guitar, piano, and violin, each of which is credited to at least two different performers at various points. (Runsteen and Lenker’s brother Noah also play occasional percussion.) The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.It is a testament to the sensitivity of Lenker’s collaborators that those arrangements so often mirror the concerns of her writing. “Vampire Empire,” a Big Thief fan favorite, gets an alternate rendition here, and its inclusion emphasizes the notion that these recordings are mere glimpses of particular moments in the lifespan of a song, not definitive final versions. Where “Real House” is airy and dreamlike, befitting the reverie of its lyrics, “Vampire Empire,” about passionate and destructive codependence, is furiously agitated. Most of the tracks on Bright Future give a sense of physical space between the players, but on this one they sound like they’re crowded around a single tinny microphone, sweating on each other as they sing and strum. It feels like the searing early home recordings of the Mountain Goats, except for Runsteen’s bouncy mallet percussion, which provides an odd but welcome undercurrent of whimsy.Lenker is a prolific songwriter, and her solo albums can sometimes feel like release valves for a creative impulse that’s too big for one band. (Shortly before the release of Bright Future, she surprise-dropped i won’t let go of your hand, a more informal collection of songs whose proceeds benefit the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.) Earlier this year, she hosted a songwriting workshop that encouraged attendees to think in terms of craft rather than divine inspiration, with assignments like writing a story based on someone else’s photograph or copying the form of a John Prine song and filling in your own details. “Evol,” one of Bright Future’s best songs, seems like it could have arisen from one such exercise. It begins, in the grand tradition of Sonic Youth and Future, by recognizing that love backwards sounds kind of like evil. From there, Lenker finds other pairs, with varying degrees of exactness: Part becomes trap, teach becomes cheat.
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