BIG|BRAVE’s A Chaos Of Flowers (ACOF) is an epic sounding album. The noise that is produced by Robin Wattie (guitar/vocals), Mathieu Ball (guitar) and Tasy Hudson (drums) is almost beyond comprehension: juddering and thunderous as if from enormous, dark industries at work in the deepest places of the earth. The huge machinery of ACOF forms a cradle for Wattie’s plaintive vocals which beam light through the dark satanic mills of the backing.
For the album Wattie drew from poets she found resonated with her, “I discovered that most poems from folk traditions or in the public domain seem to be by men – to which I could not quite relate. In my search, I rediscovered some of my favorite works and poets. It is a feeling of relatability and even astonishment really, with how these writers of different standings and eras and all being female-presenting, each expressing these seemingly similar intense moments of individual experiences, of intimacy and madness. We’re alone, and yet, not.”
The poems were then enhanced by the band into a union of anti-matter instrumentation that keeps the vocals aloft; sometimes on waves of catastrophic rumbling such as ‘not speaking of the ways’ and ‘canon : in canon’, and at others with the gently abrasive solar winds you hear on ‘theft’.
The juxtaposition of heavy instruments against haunting and sometimes tender, vocals is outstanding. It would sit well in your record collection alongside LOW’s Hey What or Ghost Woman’s Hindsight Is 50/50, a triumvirate of obsidian music that feels like a boat ride across lava or a journey to the centre of earth. This is avalanche-blues or tectonic-folk; music that not only excites molecules but also pulls you close with its own gravity. Not just big and brave but big and clever.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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