BIG|BRAVE Offer A Gripping Dreamscape With Newest Experimental Rock Album

In broad, towering brush strokes, BIG|BRAVE strike out into an impressive new world via their newest album A Gaze Among Them, out May 10 via Southern Lord Recordings. The substantive experimental rock record encapsulates an almost tribal experience of suspension among big, meaty riffs and an ethereal, transformative, ultimately dream-like atmosphere. The album feels like a walk and at times, even a dance through that fog, embracing the contrast in holding it close while it can do nothing but slip through your limbs while some unseen power remains overlord.

BIG|BRAVE are heavy on the experiential side with their music, but as an important distinguishing point, the band intriguingly never lose sight of an almost surprisingly catchy side to their tunes. On plenty of highlight occasions, even while utilizing their sprawling, unique structures, wispy connectors, and beyond, the band knock the listener with those massive, complex riffs that spread out and offer something to easily sink eager heavy music fans’ teeth into. That’s simply not at all where the band stop, heading off into a strange metaphorical jungle wherein the air is thick and humid and the creatures that lurk around the bend are somehow human.

Lyrically, they gradually descend through themes of resignation to a kind of personal destruction, which lends towards this sense of a human face glimmering through the fog of this dream. They’ve transformed into grand, dark music our human experience of being pushed out into the cold — literally and/or metaphorically. Our natural pulsations get enveloped into a grander scheme in the band’s hands as exemplified strikingly in A Gaze Among Them‘s closer, bringing the sheer intensity and seeping, dripping chaos together into a pummeling tune whose impact feels like hitting a core of the action after getting knocked around through the entry chambers of whatever secretive temple you’ve stumbled upon in your random night wanderings.

In short — BIG|BRAVE’s newest album quickly proves an epic experience in the truest sense of the term. At the same time, A Gaze Among Them is contemplatively probing and alluring, drawing the observer back in for more, and it’s an impressive feat for the band to be able to pull off each of these sides with so much force. They have brought intense, exploratory dreams alive for the heavy music community.

5/5 Stars

Listen below via Bandcamp