![]() ![]() Within Big Thief’s universe, it’s an alien landscape that feels instantly familiar. In the chorus, she returns to the idea of a “simulation swarm/With the drone of fluorescence,” contrasting these cold, electronic-sounding things (is she singing about the internet?) with the warmth of human presence, arms enfolding another’s arms. Nonetheless, the novel is indeed fiction, as the author and the narrator are not the same individuals. This novel is a work of fiction, although the author does try to confuse the audience in this respect, as both the author and the narrator are unnamed. Early in the song, as we’re still getting our bearings, she offers this dense tangle of images, making a frictionless glide from grace to menace: “A relief, beckon deep blue/Fettered in the magnet sun/Eat the gun as it feeds you/Spitting up the oxygen.” Against her bandmates’ deceptively simple backdrop she trots out her usual litany of horses and blood, pale trees and moonlit floors, and one name-Andy-held out like a talisman. Diary of an Oxygen Thief was published anonymously in 2006. It’s simultaneously cryptic and ultra-vivid, littered with crystalline visions, charged with animal spirits and intimations of violence. What hasn’t changed is Adrianne Lenker’s style of writing. ![]() Because of his sense of self-loathing he seems to go through life unworthy of the very air. The details are sharper, the shadows deeper. The Oxygen Thief in the title refers to narrators low self-esteem. All the usual components of a Big Thief song are here, but it’s as if they’ve shifted in position, relative both to each other and to you. All plants and animals need oxygen in order to live. Against a shimmering backdrop of open-string acoustic strumming, James Krivchenia lays down an uncharacteristically minimalist drum pattern, all knife’s-edge hi-hats and bone-dry snares into the wide-open space suggested by those elements sails Max Oleartchik’s high-necked bass melody, which positively glows. oxygen Oxygen is a colourless gas that exists in large quantities in the air. Diary of an oxygen thief is honest hilarious and heartrending but above all a very real account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have a done to us'-Back cover. The first thing that jumps out is the song’s dizzying crispness. ![]()
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