Sometimes gushing press releases seem so wide of the mark that you suspect they must be about a different album or even a different artist. Hats off, then, to whoever at Rarely Unable wrote the blurb for Big Brave's new album nature morte. It couldn't be more on the money - much to my chagrin as a reviewer, because it lays claim to pretty much all of the descriptors I would ideally have wanted to use myself: "elemental", "earthen heaviness", "sparseness and density", "eruptions of enveloping tempests", "ferocity and expansive sound", "heft from silence", "songs of unfathomable mass", "so immense and consuming that it possesses its own gravitational pull".
That left me somewhat clutching at straws, marvelling at how far the band have come since their folky beginnings - only to discover, shortly after I'd submitted the review, via Jeff Terich's interview with them for Treble that the recent experience of making a folk album in collaboration with The Body (Leaving None But Small Birds) has actually had a significant and reinvigorating influence on the new record. Doh.
Anyway, here's my write-up for Buzz. Suffice to say that nature morte - their first release for Thrill Jockey - is an unmitigated triumph.
No comments:
Post a Comment