Brave

Searching For The Sun (Dark Symphonies)
by Martin Popoff

Like Anathema stepping back one record and re-expanding their palette, Brave have grown their arrangements past the sparser sounds heard on the band’s previous full-length, Before an Audience of Stars, when they were called Arise From Thorns. And all this is through the process of dropping one guitarist, the Virginia band now a four-piece. It’s been a fortuitous shift to be sure, Michelle Loose and brother Scott finding themselves with a bounty of highly-memorable choruses (check out “I Believe,” again Anathema coming to mind) and pre-choruses o’er which Michelle sings like a solid, dependable Anneke. The cool thing is that this album is more like prog rock with dark melodies, with songs that are essentially energetic and full band, lots of moody pop, not a lot of long, boring passages. Brave gets to the point, the point being that this is a very unique and proggy Floyd rock world, still with thorns, but quite toothless, metallically speaking. Highlight: the highly Crimsonian “Out Of Focus.” In closing, warning: Dark, mellow chick rock with a few crashing Zep-angled chords, the morose melodies and the band’s record label being the only wispy, tenuous links to the metal world, somewhat like our original comparative, Anathema.
(PO Box 547 Billerica, MA 01821)