Album Review BIG|BRAVE & Helium Horse Fly by Kurt Gottschalk

BIG|BRAVE
A Gaze Among Them
(Southern Lord)

Helium Horse Fly
Hollowed
(Dipole Experimental Records)

It’s little wonder that the bone-crushing Montreal trio BIG|BRAVE attracted the attention of the dirge merchants at Southern Lord. Founded 21 years ago by Sunn O))) guitarist Greg Anderson, the label has become an emblem for the droney, doomy, stoner side of experimental metal. After BIG|BRAVE’s self-released 2014 debut, Southern Lord signed them up for what’s now three stunning discs of expansive agitation and disturbance.

It’s to the band’s credit that they’re in no rush to push product. They’ve been averaging an album every other year and the diligence shows. They’re comfortable in their shoes and ready to walk long distances. Four of the five tracks on the new A Gaze Among Them features stretch past the seven-minute mark. The fifth, “This Deafening Verity,” is an electric étude for voice and amplifier hum with a desperate beauty.

Robin Wattle’s plaintive yell centers the songs in an enormous emptiness of feedback and rhythm. Loel Campbell’s drums are glacial and Wattle and Mathieu Ball follow the drums with rarely a change of chords on their guitars. BIG|BRAVE exists somewhere between anger and resolve; The music pounds and nothing’s going to speed the pile driver up. The album was recorded by Seth Manchester, who knows how to use sonic space—his credits include mixing and engineering last year’s Strange Paradise by percussion ensemble Tigue and back a decade ago co-engineering Tyondai Braxton’s landmark Central Market. With added textures provided by Godspeed! You Black Emperor bassist Thierry Amar, A Gaze Among Them is BIG|BRAVE’s boldest statement yet. The delayed attack and repeated whomps of closer “Sibling” are an absolute killer.

Like BIG|BRAVE, the four-piece Helium Horse Fly—hailing from Liège, Belgium—is in no hurry to get things done. Hollowed is their fourth record in nine years and, like Gaze, is the band’s strongest. (Both are streaming in full on Bandcamp.) HHF’s music also shares a similar, slow gait with the Canadians’, but with more complex, almost proggy, overlays. Hollowed is a smart album, benefitting from tight, interlocking guitar and bass lines by Stéphane Dupont and Dimitri Iannello and solid-yet-skittering drums by Gil Chevigné. Of the six tracks, the opener “Happiness” is the hit, beginning with a jittery rhythm, a distorted guitar loop and a siren coming from the keyboard. Ninety seconds in, singer Marie Billy sings, and then repeats, “what—are these fuckers—doing—here?” with a disgust put so plainly you know someone’s in for it. The song entices without kicking in. A saxophone screams in the distance. The drums speed up, but the rhythm stays the same. The music quiets for a moment before finally hitting with actual riffs only at minute four of six. The tension is excruciating.

There are more differences than similarities between BIG|BRAVE and Helium Horse Fly, but what they have in common is strong female singers who aren’t trying to enrage or entice. Robin Wattle and Marie Billy aren’t posing as pariahs or prostitutes. They’re calm and collected. They mean business. And with the promising British postpunk outfit Savages seeming to have fallen silent, there’s room on the cooker for them to simmer.