Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “an uttering of antipathy” from BIG|BRAVE.
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.
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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 fate that befalls many power metal bands pursuing the same great heights. Dimmu Borgir has had a career on either side of that line, fitting for a band that pioneered so much of that sonic space to begin with. Here, they demonstrate why it is that they are allowed the boldness of failed experiments in their catalog. “As Seen in the Unseen” is, like all of Grand Serpent Rising, a brilliant extension of the kind of progressive black metal Emperor opened the door to. There is bleak gothic theater and animalistic grandeur here, the precise amount of melodrama this kind of music needs.
Haken – “in a fever dream”
Haken seem to have heard my cry, pulling back from some of the melodicism that drained their previous record of the previous brilliant color of their earlier work and reinserted some of the extreme metal-adjacent heaviness of their first two LPs or the work shown on the Vector / Virus duology. “in a fever dream” shows the progressive metal band placing primacy on heft and atmosphere in a manner reminiscent of Riverside or Opeth, the very kings of the mountain. For a band that possesses Dream Theater chops, that’s a strong position to place themselves. A new single is meant to stoke excitement for an upcoming album and the way this song shows a new direction for the upcoming work has most certainly done its job.
Thrown Into Exile – “Behind the Veil”
A thing that never fails to amaze me is the level of control drums have over an arrangement or riff. “Behind the Veil” is a simple song regarding riffs, being built out of only two or three primary parts that are largely unchanged. Instead, the sense of motion and development over its duration is built by the drummer’s constantly shifting approach to the beat behind, be it mid-tempo rhythmic work, a blast beat, or more cinematic arrangement. The riff is no slouch, and the band’s new singer Joshua Santos certainly brings a necessary fire to the extreme vocals which in so many bands can feel too rehearsed and safe, but this band is an instance where the drummer elevates what is good to great.
