Music reviews: Dijon and Big Thief

‘Baby!’ by Dijon

★★★★

Four years after his debut album “reimagined what contemporary pop music could sound like,” said Brady Brickner-Wood in The New Yorker, Dijon Duenas isn’t standing pat. The follow-up finds the 33-year-old Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and producer celebrating the family he and his partner, Joanie, are building, yet it’s both a “thrilling” and “demanding” listen. While Prince and Frank Ocean are clear influences, this is R&B in which all 12 tracks sound like Top 40 singles “made by an artist with a kaleidoscopic, post-modernist mind.”

Dijon and his collaborator Mk.gee recently added their signature elastic sound to Justin Bieber’s hit summer album, said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. But unlike Bieber, Dijon puts strong emotions first. “Lyrics here matter less than feeling,” and throughout the record, “fragments of sounds—fiery ad-libs, Golden Age hip-hop samples, whizzing, inverted vocal riffs—all jut out like beams of light piercing through the pitch black of night.” The final track, which “occupies a space closer to traditional R&B,” sums up the album’s theme in a single line directed at Joanie: “When I need it you shock me with your love!”

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‘Double Infinity’ by Big Thief

★★★

“Even great bands aren’t safe from unexpected shake-ups,” said Sam Rosenberg in Paste, but the 2024 departure of bassist Max Oleartchik hasn’t tripped up Big Thief. Lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker “remains peerless in her ability to weave vivid images and intense feelings into a rich, visceral tapestry of lyrics,” and she and her two remaining bandmates seem to have embraced the possibilities that enforced change unlocks, “recalibrating the band’s woodsy, folksy sound into a more percussive, psychedelic direction.” Though Double Infinity consists of only nine songs, it “rarely feels lean or lightweight.”

These are songs “less inclined to tell a story from start to finish than transport you into a space of pure feeling,” said Vrinda Jagota in Pitchfork. Whether looking forward or back, they “endeavor to express the purest kind of love,” love that’s beyond words, and the music follows suit. It “captures the sound of ceding control, of pursuing a kind of emotional truth that can only be experienced, not intellectualized.” Here and there, the effort “leads to songs that float by without direction.” Mostly, the results prove “incredibly worthy.”