Heavy Song of the Week: BIG|BRAVE Bring Emotional Heft to "an uttering of antipathy"

A new single, “an uttering of antipathy,” by BIG|BRAVE is presented as a heavy track that turns sound into feeling. Heavy music is described as more than riffs, screams, growls, and compressed drums; it becomes an emotional or physical experience. BIG|BRAVE are characterized as hard to label, with melodically rich compositions that still rely on sculptured noise and feedback. Vocals are processed with a vocoder, and the effects are linked to the band’s later years and Mimi Parker’s cancer diagnosis. The refrain “God only blames me” over turbulent noise is framed as capturing why people stay in heavy music for its emotional universe. Honorable mentions include Dimmu Borgir’s “As Seen in the Unseen.”

"Heavy music to the outsider is a monolithic slab of riffs, screams, growls, compressed drums and theater. Those in the know, however, start to see that heaviness is less a particular sound and more a feeling you get, an experience that can be as much emotional or physical as it is sonic. There's a reason why so many people deep enough in the trenches love country and folk, noise and orchestral music, found sound and electronica. When you chase heaviness, you eventually find a universe, not just a world."

"BIG|BRAVE have always been a curious group. They're too melodically rich for a term like "post-metal" to make much sense, or "drone" for that matter, but yet still the most obvious sonic building block of their work is sculptured noise and feedback. The vocals all over in grief or in hope, their upcoming album, are passed through a vocoder, but the effects are less T-Pain (no knock to the great, to be clear) and more Low in those later years as Mimi Parker was quietly nursing a cancer diagnosis that would later take her from us."

"The vocal refrain of "God only blames me" over turbulent noise certainly doesn't feel anything but heavy. It captures why, beyond the black leather and midnight evil that drives us in youth toward heavy metal and punk, that emergence of the radical singular-communal self, we are drawn so deep into this sonic world. You rarely leave the world of heavy music once you enter. And so much of that is the emotional universe you find within it."

"Honorable Mentions Dimmu Borgir - "As Seen in the Unseen" Symphonic black metal is a tightrope. Blending the Ur-theatricality of the most obscenely grandiloquent worlds of heavy metal can in a single step leave you with cornball tripe, a"

Read at Consequence