Lest We Forget...Big/Brave : "Feral Verdure"

Here is a blast from the most recent past as this album came out last September on Southern Lord and really slipped through the cracks. This is a damn shame because there is some pretty good stuff here. At full length their is thirty three minutes of music is varied interpretations of the word. This counts as an album since it's longer than  the twenty eight minutes of Reign in Blood" There is more gloom than doom and noise than sludge like qualities, but feels more like if PJ Harvey got depressed and began jamming with Jucifer. Tempo wise there is an angular lingering not unlike that of True Widow. Things here much rougher around the edges and are not draped in that western re-verb.The vocals also have more enthusiasm , The singer flexes the dynamic muscles of her vocal chords on "A song for foxes" she drops down into more a Hope Sandoval register. The album's heaviness lies in it's emotional bleakness.

The tension of the guitars to " Let Us Rest Our Dead..."  unfolds into a noise slathered clamor which rocks out to much  the call them slow core. They become more aggressive on " Bigot" pounding the chords like a Swans song.  The instrumentation takes on a drugged hesitation and could work on the sound track of a David Lynch movie, despite the vocals being very straight forward not only on this song , but through out the album leaving her voice to at times anchor the songs to the only part that is retaining it's sanity. The apocalyptic blues title might apply to a song like "There are No Victories". "A Song For Marie" is just a wall of feedback and noise serving as ore of an interlude and providing a storm for the gentler vocals of " Feral Verdure" to come out of. The guitar and drums tumble into the song behind her vocals. Leaving her voice naked for the bulk of the song. She has some emotive moments , but the deliberate disjointed nature of the song after the wall of noise preceding feels like the album ends with more of a fizzle. This is still balance out by the fact that this really defies jumping on any of the current band wagons ,making this band very unique. I'll give this a 9 and look forward to hearing what the future brings from them.