BRAVERY IN BATTLE – The House We Live In
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Usually writing a review about an album is a thing of routine, more or less. Sometimes it’s easier to write about music, at other times you have to think hard to find the right words, and then you have Bravery In Battle, a post rock band from Paris in France, whose first longplayer The House We Live In clearly shows you that you can never do it true justice. The band has been working on this album for five years, and it turns out to be an over eighty minutes long piece of art that will be available as a digital download but more importantly also as a CD/DVD package, which in this case seems to be the wiser choice. The album consists of fifteen tracks, mostly all around five minutes long. More than half of the songs are post rock songs with the music written around speeches by philosophers, scientists, entrepreneurs etc. Something similar has been done in the recent past by French pianist Christophe Chassol, by finding melody in spoken words by letting instruments play along to the rhythm and tonality. According to the band, composer Steve Reich did that even earlier, so thank you for teaching me something I didn’t know. Usually, there is an instrumental piece between the speeches tracks, and both work incredibly well. Bravery In Battle play symphonic kind of post rock, reminding of early Mogway and Sigur Ros, blending rock instruments with strings and brass sections, resulting at times in the ecstatic grandeur of an early Sufjan Stevens. So you have the gorgeous music, coupled with the really great speeches by a wide array of eminent intellectuals, making this a both an ear and eye opening experience. My promo package even came with a nearly hundred-page long CD booklet plus two further books elaborating on the state of the planet we are living on. To do all of this justice, I would have needed weeks of concentration and time, but I believe this is something you want to spend your time with, provided you are concerned about the current state of affairs and not just a mindless hedonist living like there is no tomorrow. In times where most artists only seem to care about themselves or nothing at all, it feels rewarding to discover a band like Bravery In Battle. They may not have reinvented post rock, but the result is just as good, maybe even better. than that of their influences. Taken together with the gigantic work that went into all of this, just to give their audience both music and information, makes this in my opinion one of the most important albums of the last few years. The House We Live In, as an artistic and intellectual statement, is truly unprecedented! |
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15 songs |
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81:53 minutes |
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***** ***** |
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Genre: post rock Label: Believe |
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