Anybody who has even the most passing familiarity with this blog can tell that there are a few musical tropes that I cannot resist. Among them are crushing walls of sound, ominous, glacial tempos, lush atmospheres, and emotional female voices.
And Big Brave from Montreal delivers all these in spades, combining each of my favorite colors into a stunning landscape that is at once sonically crushing and achingly gorgeous.
As much as I love old-school shoegaze and new wave, I might enjoy it just as much when the punks lay down their aggressive downstrokes and power chords to reappropriate those sounds and moods in earnest.
Granted, neither Hopesfall nor Celebrity have exactly shied away from integrating these retro influences in their brands of post-hardcore. Even at their heaviest, they’ve retained a sense of tunefulness and melancholy that recall bands like New Order, My Bloody Valentine, and of course The Cure.
But when members of those projects join forces to delve more sincerely honor those influences, the result is magical.
It feels bizarre to remember now, but by the time 2000 rolled around, many people had felt that the emo scene was already waning—after all, Sunny Day Real Estate had already broken up and had a reunion. Mineral had been defunct for two years. And even those stalwarts were considered to be latecomers—and even imposters—to a scene rooted in emotional hardcore bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace.
But the turn of the Millenium saw an explosion of the emo scene, with bands like American Football, The Appleseed Cast, Jimmy Eat World, and hundreds of others borrowing the juxtaposition of sparkling clean guitars and cathartic explosions of distortion to create their own language.
One of the understated heroes of this scene was The Casket Lottery, formed by former members of mathcore pioneers Coalesce. While certainly a departure from their off-time metalcore chugs, there’s certainly enough muscle in their sophomore album, Moving Mountains, to dissuade anyone from calling them wimpy emo kids.
I received a great kindness the other day.
Some months back, my friend Billy commented on one of my posts about David Bowie and we got to talking about his Berlin Trilogy. I mentioned that I had never been able to find a copy of Lodger, the third (and perhaps oddest) in the run and put the conversation out of my mind.
But not Billy.
A few days ago, he showed up at my wife’s shop with a copy for her to give me. That is generous enough, but it went even deeper. As it turns out, many years ago, he had given away his record collection when he came to faith, and when he found out that I was missing this record, he tracked down the friend to whom he had gifted his records so that he could fill the gap in my collection.
That’s a rare gift, and in most cases, the music itself would be overshadowed by that generosity. But Lodger is just as odd and meandering as the tale that brought it to me.