[ATTENDED: March 18, 2017] Big ‡ Brave
I hadn’t heard of Big ‡ Brave when I saw that they were opening for Sunn O))). Before the show I read this compelling description: “Big Brave utilize many elements of drone, noise, and post rock with female fronted vocals that are almost reminiscent of Bjork as far as tone.”
They play slow and loud. And their songs are very bass-heavy even though there is no bass! Two guitars making very low rumbles.
The band is a trio–2 guitars and a fairly sparse drum kit. Robin Wattie (here’s a video of her singing) stood on the far side of the stage. She sang an impassioned wail and often kept time by thumping her guitar (generating more drone I’m sure) before playing low, loud chords.
Closest to me was guitarist Mathieu Bernard Ball. He was constantly in motion, rocking up and down as he played wondrous noises (see video) with his guitar.
In the center was drummer Louis-Alexandre Beauregard who hit the drums with an ugodly wallop. At times, given the droney nature of the music, Beauregard became the center of attention–keeping the beat, accenting and punctuating songs, and, in my favorite moment–creating all kinds of interesting percussive sounds (when he scraped the bottom of his drumstick against the cymbal to make an echoing shrieking sound, it was mind-blowing).
During one song, Mathieu put his guitar up to his mouth–was he yelling into it? I have no idea, but it was cool.
I lost count of the number of songs they played–possibly four, possibly five. The songs were all quite long (easily ten minutes for many of them). I used the word droney before, but the band isn’t exactly droney. They have chords that ring out and their beats are very slow. But the bursts of noise from the drums and the feedback squalls from the guitars remove it from the drone world. And the vocals–high pitched and keening–remove it even further from the low bass rumblings of most drone metal.
There were many times during their songs where there would be a pause of silence before the song continued. One lasted far longer than it seemed like it would–we all thought the song was over. But the most interesting part was in the one song where Robin would play a chord with her guitar turned off. Then she would switch it back on, on the beat, so that the chord didn’t sound like she had just “played” it. It just seemed to come out of nowhere. That was cool enough, but the sing added pauses that were so quiet (and the audience so quiet) that I could hear her strum the guitar before she turned it back on. That was neat.
I really enjoyed the way some of the songs were maybe two chords, sometimes possibly even one chord, just repetitive and lulling (but really noisy) until it began to morph into something else.
They didn’t say much, Robin said hi few times and thanked us for coming. It took someone shouting “who are you?” before she introduced the band. And then she told us how nice the guys from Sunn O))) were.
I really enjoyed their set a lot (no idea what songs they played though), and I’m looking forward to listening to their album some more.
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