Ever since guitar amplifiers grew powerful enough to promise total obliteration, there have been people like BIG|BRAVE’s Mathieu Ball and Robin Wattie, staring into that blind conical eye and figuring out how far inside of it they might travel. Over the Montreal trio’s 10 albums, Ball and Wattie have become scientists and poet-explorers of vibrations, coaxing sensuous waves from the sounds electric guitars make when played, as well as the ones they make when they are just turned up and allowed to hum. Ball built a guitar with an aluminum neck and began placing his headstock on top of his amp, so that the quaking cabinet shook the strings by itself. There’s a spirit of exorcism in this approach, an implicit belief that certain loud sounds are more like elemental beings to be summoned than the logical result of wires and inputs.
BIG|BRAVE music is perversely soothing, in the way that a sick day can feel luxurious, and their new album, in grief or in hope, might be the warmest and brightest pool of cold, dark sounds they’ve yet made. They’ve subtracted drums this time, rendering their music even more stark. This is music of deep solitude, and inside a good pair of headphones, it can transform your buzzing mind into just another chassis to be rumbled clean.
There is a troubled soul waiting for you inside, however, and that is Wattie, who sings as if caught praying. Her song titles read like snippets of larger poems, and she has a poet’s ear for chewy bits of verbiage like “To shape or to shield, to define or defend,” “swallow cures,” or “Let you/I will let you/Live.” She sings directly into the guitars’ massive roar, giving her words a disembodied feel, as if arriving on the wind.
On “verdure,” Wattie pits herself against nothing but a single, echoing boom. Who knows how this particular boom was produced. It could be one over-powered amp being plugged in, on loop. A laptop could be involved, or maybe a cistern. But as it reverberates, it begins to unfold and separate itself—steel-grey and pure black steadily cede to dark purple, hints of oil-slick rainbow iridescence, and somewhere, glimmering up in the treble frequencies, an eerie luminosity. Wattie’s lyrics are unintelligible, but clear enough in their yearning that I keep returning to make sense of them.
I cannot imagine playing play in grief or in hope for a roomful of friends; it would feel a bit like an unwelcome confession. But I have listened to in grief or in hope every day now for two weeks, even as the weather outside expands and the light softens. The last time through, I was stopped cold by Wattie’s repetition of “God only blames me,” from “an uttering of antipathy.” A consolation? A condemnation? The music enfolds you in its welcoming bleakness, offering all interpretations as possibilities as long as you stay.
