If you’ve been following the wider musical discourse over the past month – and if you’ve been reading my What I’ve Been Listening To column – you’ve probably at least heard of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, the latest album from Brooklyn folk/country/indie rock four-piece Big Thief. Big Thief have been one of the buzzier indie rock bands of the past few years, first turning heads with 2016’s Masterpiece, their ostentatiously-titled debut album, and its follow up, 2017’s Capacity, the latter of which notched them a coveted “Best New Music” designation from Pitchfork. After making a name for themselves with their beautiful and ferocious live shows, in 2019 they released two albums – the erie, folky U.F.O.F. and the ragged, more rock-oriented Two Hands – which not only nabbed two more Best New Musics, but also earned them three Grammy nominations (U.F.O.F. for Best Alternative Album, and Two Hands track “Not” for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance) while band members Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek released well-received solo work. 

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (which, for the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to as Dragon from here on out), a sprawling, 80-minute double album recorded in four different locations during the COVID-19 lockdown, feels a lot like a culmination, not only of the string of singles they released last year, but also of everything they’ve recorded up to this point. It’s both a synthesis of the Old Weird America style of folk music and Crazy Horse aping-guitar rock that they’ve already explored in studio and on stage, as well as a step forward, featuring psychedelic leaps forward on songs like “Little Things” and “Time Escaping,” and futuristic, almost trip-hop influenced experimentation on “Flower of Blood” and “Blurred View.” In another Best New Music review, Andy Cush of Pitchfork writes that the album’s brilliance lies in the way it combines the enormity of the band’s ambitions with their lightness of touch. “Dragon is as heavy in its lyrical concerns as any previous Big Thief record, and more ambitious in its musical ideas than all of them,” he writes. “But it also sounds unburdened, animated by a newfound sense of childlike exploration and play. Twenty times, it asks ‘What should we do now?’, and twenty times it finds a new answer.” In an even more effusive review for Uproxx, Steven Hyden confers Dragon instant classic status, writing that “it already feels like the kind of album that’s destined to be handed down from generation to generation, like Automatic For The People or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It’s music I know I will reach for on epic road trips or in the midst of profound grief. An all-timer. A masterpiece. They really did it this time.”

But while the praise for Big Thief and Dragon may be plentiful, it isn’t universal. 

The most conspicuous skeptic has been The New York Times, and more specifically their pop critic Jon Caramanica, who started a minor music Twitter kerfuffle when he expressed his ambivalence about the group on an episode of the newspaper’s Popcast podcast. That wouldn’t be remarkable in and of itself if it wasn’t paired with the paper’s seeming refusal to even write about Big Thief (a band, I should add, that is based in New York) despite devoting music features to much more obscure artists like Gen Z novelty rapper Jimothy. Caramanica sought to rectify this oversight on Popcast’s latest episode, inviting Jon Dolan of Rolling Stone and Sam Sodomsky of Pitchfork, both of whom have written about the band for their respective publications, onto the show to try and figure out, in his own words, “what it is about this band that is appealing to those that are fascinated by it, and also potentially cause revulsion in me.”

I’ll give credit where it’s due: Caramanica seems like a genuinely curious and thoughtful critic who earnestly wants to parse out not only the Big Thief phenomenon, but also the experience of seeing your peers fawn over an artist you just can’t connect with. Anyone who pays serious attention to music has a few artists who they think are overpraised (for me it’s Car Seat Headrest, Future, and post-For Emma, Forever Ago Bon Iver), and Caramanica has in fact “done the work” by listening to and engaging with the Big Thief’s catalog and inviting people who disagree with him onto his podcast to hash it all out. The first half or so of the episode is helpful both as a Big Thief primer, and as an introduction to Caramanica’s perspective (the short version is: he’s mostly a rap guy). But it does take over half-an-hour before Sodomsky asks Caramanica the question that I, as a Big Thief fan, was hoping this episode would answer: namely, what is it about Big Thief that rubs Caramanica the wrong way?

Apparently, that answer is twofold. The most understandable of Caramanica’s objections is to what he calls the “musical” aspect of the band. He has trouble with Adrianne Lenker’s voice, which even I have to concede can be thin and creaky on certain songs (which isn’t to say that a thin and creaky voice can’t be deployed effectively, of course). He also compares their sonic construction to “paint splatter,” and disagrees with Dolan’s assertion that Big Thief are a rhythm band, saying that, instead, they cause him “arrhythmia.” I don’t entirely disagree with this either – one thing that kept me from absolutely loving Big Thief’s early albums is that they never seemed to be able to sustain a consistent, propulsive beat. For as rhythmically assured as “Masterpiece,” their first real hit, may sound, their early work is also full of songs like “Real Love,” which features a brilliant guitar tone and vocal performance but stops and starts in a way that I (and apparently Caramanica) can find vexing. In a similar vein, a lot of their acoustic ballads, like “Cut My Hair” and “Wolf,” hang in a state of hookless, beatless limbo that can be found across the catalogs of other indie artists who borrow from folk and country like Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and even Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. 

But this argument about Big Thief’s apparent rhythmic deficiencies only makes me more confused about Caramanica’s position on Dragon. One of the things that makes this new album such a triumph is that it tightens up Lenker’s songwriting and gives even the slowest tracks, like “Change” and “The Only Place,” a sense of momentum that helps to focus the ear (an improvement that I’m sure is owed to producer James Krivchenia, who’s also the band’s drummer). Caramanica highlights “Heavy Bend” as one of the few songs he found himself enjoying on Dragon, and it’s easy to see why – its back beat and elliptical guitar arpeggios make it sound like a hip-hop instrumental, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear it sampled on an album Caramanica will end up fawning over a few years from now. But does he really not hear any kind of engaging rhythm on the gentle churn of “Simulation Swarm?” Can he not hear that “Little Things” is so sweeping because the only thing it’s concerned with is rhythm and texture? Was he not charmed by the drunken country swing of “Blue Lightning?” Caramanica makes a joke about having to read along to the lyrics of Dragon to fully grasp their meaning, but his inability to pick up on the clear rhythmic process that the band has made on this album makes me wonder if he might benefit from peering at some of Krivchenia’s sheet music to confirm that there are, in fact, drumbeats on this record.

Caramanica describes his other problem with Big Thief as “extra-musical.” Specifically, he says that he has a problem with “messianic narratives” and alleges that Big Thief has been put over by some critics and fans a little too fervently, objecting specifically to Vulture titling their interview with the band “The Miracle of Big Thief.” I’m sympathetic to this point of view too – it’s incredibly annoying to be told over and over again that any artist is infallible, and at some point, an artist can become so effusively praised that they by default become overrated – but let’s not pretend like this is a problem unique to Big Thief, or that they’re even the most dire example of it. Does Caramanica have the same “extra-musical” problem with artists like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Kendrick Lamar, artists he’s lauded in the New York Times and who have fan armies who would make his mild Big Thief Twitter dust ups look like a walk in the park?

Caramancia alludes to this “extra-musical” problem early on in the podcast before explicitly naming it when he claims that “indie rock…is not I would say in a particularly robust place right now” and asks Dolan and Sodomsky if there’s “some need to lionize a band, to kind of point at something and be like ‘that, finally, that…in this drought, we have this, and this is Big Thief.’” Sodomsky and Dolan politely rebuffed Caramanica’s assertions about this supposed indie rock “drought,” but it’s a point I want to dwell on, because it’s the only one of Caramanica’s points that is demonstrably wrong.

There’s no argument that not just rock music writ large, but indie rock, in particular, has ceded some influence over the wider culture in the past decade or so. We’re now ten years removed from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, and indie acts like Sleigh Bells and The National aren’t making appearances on Saturday Night Live the way they were back in the mid-2010s. But Caramanica’s implication that Big Thief are lone stars from an otherwise dormant genre makes me question the breadth of his musical intake. Only three years ago, Mitski’s Be the Cowboy topped Pitchfork’s list of the 50 Best Albums of 2018. In 2019, Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride – an album I’m not afraid to call a masterpiece – and Bon Iver’s i,i were both nominated for Album of the Year. A year ago, Phoebe Bridgers caused a stupid but viral Twitter firestorm when she smashed a guitar on Saturday Night Live. According to Metacritic, the best reviewed non-soundtrack album of 2022 so far is Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There, an album by a band so indie that they may not exist soon. Also in 2022, The War On Drugs played Madison Square freaking Garden, right in Caramanica’s backyard. And that’s not even mentioning well-received albums that have been released over the last twelve months from artists like Snail Mail, The Armed, Spirit of the Beehive, Low, Bachelor, and the like. I’m not trying to impugn Caramanica’s character, talents, or his taste. But it’s difficult for me to listen to someone dismiss an entire genre as going through a “drought” from the offices of the paper of record and not assume that he either isn’t looking in the right places or if that there’s something else keeping him from not only enjoying, but noticing, album upon album of great music. There’s nothing wrong with genre biases – lord knows I have my own – but it is critical malpractice to project your own ignorance as reality, and to do so on a platform that people trust. 

I wouldn’t be so miffed about Caramanica’s “drought” comment if it didn’t represent a theme in his criticism, which tends to write off anything remotely associated with indie rock as less than. In a critical review of Taylor Swift’s folklore, Caramanica laments the pop titan’s collaboration with The National’s Aaron Dessner, accusing Swift of trying to reach beyond her already rabid fanbase by ensconcing herself in the “alleged seriousness of indie rock” and engaging in a “full retreat into whiteness” after her dalliances with hip-hop on the tepidly received (but Caramanica-defended) Reputation. Early on in the review, he praises a Swift lyric from “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” where she slags off “‘some indie rock that’s much cooler than mine,’” but then accuses Swift of recording exactly that kind of album, railing against “mopey interiority” that’s “mistaken for… depth” and “deserves all the eyerolls it gets.” 

I don’t disagree with Caramanica about mopey interiority – it’s one of the reasons why I can’t sit through a Father John Misty or Sun Kil Moon record. But when you consider this review with his comments on the Popcast that Big Thief’s decision to not play a lucrative corporate event as “quaint as fuck,” you begin to wonder what, exactly, this guy has against indie rock and its ethos. Again, I don’t disagree with the idea that bands should do whatever they have to do to keep themselves financially solvent. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an argument that was settled ten years ago when most indie bands realized the only way they could make a steady income was by putting their songs in car commercials. But you also get the sense that, whatever aesthetic issues he may have with indie rock, Caramanica just can’t stomach the idea that an artist might choose to reject fame and fortune to follow their muse or maintain a sense of integrity. Record an album without a clearcut radio single like Taylor Swift did on folklore and you take yourself too seriously. Turn down a corporate gig you don’t feel comfortable playing and you’re quaint. At the risk of veering into the ad hominem, it’s enough to make one wonder if Caramanica is harboring a secret set of insecurities that makes him assume that anyone engaging in vaguely “indie” behavior thinks that they’re better than him. As an indie rock fan, I’d like to assure him that this isn’t the case.

It could very well be that the gap between Caramanica’s and my tastes and perceptions are generational. A forty-something, Caramancia entered his 20s in an era during which alternative rock was ascendent, and where pop stars (and some rappers) were seen as phonies and sell outs. Conversely, I entered my 20s in an era where superficiality was celebrated and any artist without a heavily lacquered “extra-musical” personality was shunted aside in favor of overexposed celebrities. And that’s one of the reasons why I love Big Thief – there’s no social media drama, no controversial headlines, no inane feuds. There’s also remarkably little ego – even though Lenker is the focal point of the group, they insist on presenting themselves as a cohesive unit, not a vessel for one person’s artistic vision. In the words of Steven Hyden, they eschew vapid expressions of stardom for “things that matter more, like songs, a point of view, and the intangible feeling that’s conjured when musicians with chemistry assemble in a room and become something greater than the sum of their respective parts.” I’m almost convinced that part of the reason Caramanica has such a hard time wrapping his mind around the appeal of Big Thief is that he’s become so enmeshed in analyzing the personalities of mega-celebrities who also happen to sing that the idea of a guitar-based rock band with no larger marketing agenda being at the center of the cultural conversation feels alien to him. 

Like I said, I can’t make Caramanica like Big Thief’s aesthetic choices. In fact, the critical conversation around Big Thief would be less interesting if he did like their music. But at some point his fixation on this alleged messiah narrative (evidence of which is limited to that one aforementioned Vulture headline, which is itself a play on a Lenker quote) and misreading of the current indie rock landscape feels willfully obtuse. Caramanica has done the work in the sense that he’s listened to Big Thief and figured out what it is he doesn’t like about it. But he’s too comfortable in his incorrect ideas about how the modern indie rock landscape currently looks – or, perhaps, given his biases, how he thinks the indie rock landscape ought to look – to not try and justify his dislike for them and their genre by declaring it dead or dying. I respect the fact that he’s bold enough to say that he doesn’t like Adrianne Lenker’s voice and the band’s approach to rhythm. But if he thinks there’s something inherently cheap or dishonest about guitar-based music, he should just come out and say that, too.