A brave band at the epicentre of music in Montreal, Canada, Big Brave has ventured into an action plan that, without compromising on weight, intensity and volume, reveals a sense of space, tension and vulnerability that is rarely felt in a torrent so imposing on the senses. Returning to the ZDB stage for the third time, in proof of a growing cult following, this trio made up of Mathieu Ball on guitar, Robin Wattie on vocals and guitar and Tasy Hudson on drums and percussions bring their increasingly personalised avalanche of repetitive riffs, feedback, atmospheric passages, martial rhythms and Wattie’s expressive voice with ‘A Chaos of Flowers’, again on Thrill Jockey, after the colossus of ‘nature morte’, following the fertile sequence of four albums on Southern Lord.
Created from the foundations laid with ‘nature morte’, ‘A Chaos of Flowers’ continues to tread a path very much its own, where the initial influences of the more esoteric Doom and its abstraction and/or lamination perpetrated by Sunn O))) or Earth appear increasingly diluted in a torrent full of poetry, not only in its most figurative sense but also factual. Drawing inspiration from poems by women from different eras and geographies, Wattie has achieved an emotional resonance that overflows unhurriedly in the delivery and weight of the words. From this intimate space, marked by the dichotomy between serenity and restlessness, we arrive at the collective of shared experience. Something that is revealed in the music itself, in a call that reclaims all the purity of folk or blues, to drain them through feedback sculpted with the parsimony of sparse rhythms, with Wattie’s voice as the gravitational centre of all this catharsis. Featuring the illustrious participation of Marisa Anderson and Tashi Dorji on guitars and Patrick Shiroishi on saxophone in some of the beasts, ‘A Chaos of Flowers’ opens up new perspectives for this sound that draws beauty from darkness. BS
