Photo by Justyna Kamínska @fotopixey - via Big Brave - Facebook
Big Brave
Big Brave
Upon first listen, “i felt a funeral,” the lead track on Big Brave’s latest album, 2024’s A Chaos of Flowers (Thrill Jockey Records), sounds like the perfect soundtrack for the chaos that marks the contemporary world. Over a mournful squall of guitar feedback, vocalist Robin Wattie desolately laments, “And then a plank in reason broke/And I dropped down and down/And hit a world at every plunge/And finished knowing then.”
Yet the lyrics to “I felt a funeral” were not written in response to the global crisis of democracy. Nor are they about our collective inability to address the climate crisis. In fact, the lyrics were not even written by Wattie; they come from Emily Dickison’s 1861 poem, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” In just one song, Big Brave reminds us that the confusion of the modern moment may not be so modern after all.
Throughout A Chaos of Flowers, Wattie draws from a variety of female authors, including Yosano Akiko, Renne Vivien, and E. Pauline Johnson (also known by her Mohawk name Tekahionwake). Yet Wattie’s strategy here is not one of appropriation. Instead, the vocalist interprets these works in ways that make them relevant to new audiences. Wattie’s channeling of these voices makes the point that many of the oppressive forces currently holding us down—along with the resistance to such forces—have long histories.
Wattie’s vocals draw much of their power from the sounds Tasy Hudson (drums) and Mathieu Ball (guitar) conjure up around her. Earlier albums by the band embraced volume and complexity; Wattie’s voice was one piece of an often-earsplitting cacophony. Perhaps not surprisingly, Big Brave are often classified as a “metal” band. Yet in writing the songs that appear on A Chaos of Flowers, Ball explains that they kept coming back to one word: “minimalism.” As Ball notes, “Over the years we’ve slowed down our pace more and more,” stripping out sounds that seemed extraneous to a song’s overall power. Such an approach puts extra emphasis on Wattie’s pleading vocals.
Yet Ball is also quick to explain that such an approach turns each song into “a meditation.” “If you play one chord and let it ring out,” he continues, “you get to hear so many beautiful qualities, like the harmonics that would otherwise just get covered up by the next chord being immediately played over it. So much is lost when you do too much.” Here, the commitment to minimalism becomes central to the band’s philosophy. Minimalism, for Ball, “helps us slow our pace down within the chaos of the world. Everything is so fast paced in our world. It’s nice to take your time with certain things.”
It is often difficult to create both meaningful art as well as strategies of resistance within environments defined by almost constant stimulation. As Ball notes, the songs on A Chaos of Flowers allow the listener to “Focus on one thing, focus on the minute changes.” Such an act of concentration runs counter to the way we currently consume cultural products. At the same time, most contemporary cultural producers are not referencing poems from the nineteenth century. There is power in history, Big Brave reminds us. And there is power in creating the space needed to truly listen to the voices of the past.
Big Brave perform August 8 at X-Ray Arcade.
