In the ten years since their debut, Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE have released seven albums, eight if you include 2021’s stoner-folk collaboration with The Body. It seems like an obscenely prolific turnover for a band concerned with slow growth, whose songs often feel monumental or glacial. But BIG|BRAVE aren’t your average purveyors of slow-cooker ambience. They describe their sound as ‘massive minimalism’, and while that phrase certainly fits, it doesn’t quite convey everything you need to know. For one thing, there is a humanity to their sound, which is perhaps unexpected given the physical enormity. Like prehistoric architecture, it is built to be experienced, even if the nature of that experience is mysterious.
And for a band built on the idea of enormity, they are paradoxically prone to change. Delve into their back catalogue, and you might find influences ranging from early Sonic Youth to the Cocteau Twins. Early tracks like A Song For Foxes are like Hole played at the pace of Bohren & Der Club of Gore; some of the more recent stuff sounds like an aggressively ambient take on Faust. Lately, the influence of traditional music, always there somewhere in the background, has made itself more apparent, and A Chaos Of Flowers continues this trend. Opening song I Felt A Funeral feels like a distorted and slightly nightmarish folk ballad. Singer Robin Wattie delivers an alluring melody before a heavy and frazzled guitar leads the song down darker backstreets. The thick production (courtesy of Seth Manchester) and crushingly heavy low end lend a cavernous air to proceedings, but there is a weird prettiness on show here too, like graveside flowers.
Guitarist Mathieu Ball lends a crunchy post-rock (or post-metal) sensibility to Not Speaking of the Ways: a minimal but heavily distorted riff is augmented by Wattie’s dramatic, echoing vocals. Halfway through, there is a kind of void or gap before the rhythmic thump and the grind of guitars returns, more punishing than before. This is heavy music, made somehow heavier by what’s left out. Chanson Pour Mon Ombre is a case in point: an opening passage of picked acoustic guitar and Wattie’s singing is all the more threatening for its barely noticeable undertow, and then, as if to confirm your worst fears, the song descends into an unavoidable madness of abstract guitar and Tasy Hudson’s clattering percussion. It’s quite a brilliant display of timing and dynamics.
Canan : In Canon welds slow, steely percussion to slabs of guitar and a disarmingly sweet vocal with a result that contains both satisfying post-rock crunch and the sludgier aesthetic of Japanese psych-metal experimentalists Boris. The slowcore pacing at times recalls a heavier Low, but there are more layers of strangeness, particularly here with guest guitarist Marisa Anderson adding her licks to the mix. The short interlude A Song For Marie Part III uses the most pared-back of ingredients to create a soundscape at once menacing and comforting, while Theft advances on a surprisingly malleable bass part, which makes the stabs of guitar and glitchy background noise even more striking.
The monolithic discordance reaches its apex on Quotidian : Solemnity, which sounds like something hewn from a meteor. Surprising sparks fly off it in the form of Wattie’s vocals, while the distorted guitar keeps up a clenched scream for the length of the song. Closing track Moonset has a gentler growth to it, again showing BIG|BRAVE’s proximity to traditional music. Here, the guitars – including Marisa Anderson again – sound almost bluesy, and Wattie gives one of her most outwardly song-like performances before the song’s final section arrives like a tide, full of Hudson’s pounding drums impressionistic sprays of guitar.
Listening to A Chaos Of Flowers for the first time is like stumbling across an artefact and not being sure if it’s from the past or the future or even if it was created by human hand or by some occult design. But the more attention you give it, the more human elements start to emerge. Wattie’s songwriting, for example, is heavily inspired by her reading of various female poets, and this deep understanding of the link between creativity and womanhood comes across more with every listen. It is just one of many layers that make A Chaos Of Flowers such a visceral, moving, complex and gloriously heavy piece of work.
Out on Thrill Jockey Records – April 19, 2024