Big Brave

Big Brave – Nature Morte (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 43:04 minutes | 461 MB | Genre: Metal, Post-Metal, Drone Metal, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Thrill Jockey

BIG|BRAVE, the elemental ensemble of guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie, guitarist Mathieu Ball, and drummer Tasy Hudson, harness an earthen heaviness composed of distorted and textural drones, austere bombast, and Wattie’s heart-rending voice. Like recent collaborators The Body, BIG|BRAVE is at the forefront of reconfiguring the landscape of heavy music. The trio brandish sparseness and density like weapons, cast tense atmospheres with languid tempos and mutate feedback into eruptions of enveloping tempests. nature morte sharpens BIG|BRAVE’s ferocity and expansive sound into emotional elegies for the disenfranchised, wringing abstracted textures and pure fervence into songs of unfathomable mass.

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Big Brave – Vital (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:38 minutes | 416 MB | Genre: Metal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © (RED) Southern Lord

Minimalism and instinct, structure/freedom and meticulous timing form the cornerstones of BIG | BRAVE’s precise, rhythmical sound. On their new album VITAL, the recording features the core trio Robin Wattie, Mathieu Ball and Tasy Hudson, for their most collaborative record they’ve made so far. The band comments, “having cut our teeth in very different musical backgrounds respectively, our intuitions vary, which has an interesting effect on our individual approaches and ears.” Lyrically, VITAL explores the weight of race and gender, endurance and navigating other people’s behaviors, observation and protest. The band further commented “this album involves what it means navigating the outside world in a racialized body and what it does to the psyche as a whole while exploring individual worth within this reality.”
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Big Brave – Ardor (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 39:24 minutes | 707 MB | Genre: Experimental, Metal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Southern Lord

Montreal’s Big|Brave present Ardor, a powerfully emotional 45-minute long release which balances droning soundscapes and screeching feedback with Robin Wattie’s haunting vocals for an imaginative and cathartic album.
Big|Brave are signed to American experimental metal label Southern Lord, but their music is less easily definable than many of their label mates. They certainly share the brutal heaviness of that genre, but their emotionally charged music has an epic, sprawling quality that also aligns it with post-rock. With that in mind, it’s unsurprising that the Montrealers have enlisted violinist Jessica Moss and Godspeed You Black Emperor’s Thierry Amar, who plays contrabass on two of the tracks, for their latest record. Both Moss and Godspeed are on Canada’s post-rock label Constellation, and Big|Brave occupy a musical landscape that thrillingly absorbs both genres.
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