Maybe upbeat slo-core? From, I think (but I'm not positive), Australia. Music that moves like Low, or Codeine, but with vocals that ride heavy, reminding me in the delivery of Spain, at least for the first song. The second song hits in the same Codeined style, but the vocals are traded off for a smooth ethereal dream. Male and female vocals shift tracks and turns, keeping the songs held together like holding hands. It's music for when you are alone, and when you're alone, these songs understand your sadness.

The familiar feel of this Australian quartet's music is both its blessing and its curse. It's quite easy to slip into numbers like "The Air Between", which, through their gentle, shimmering melodies, invoke some of the best dreamy trance-pop indie rock can offer. However, their approach is so well-worn that it's difficult to distinguish them from their brethren. Perhaps the most defining feature is the band's tendency to restrain its songs from exploding into cliched climaxes of distortion. The music here is good, but lacks an identifiable, individual signature that identifies it as Braving the Seabed and no one else.

This self-titled disc from Australian quartet Braving the Seabed is like walking along an ocean shoreline while holding hands with a lifelong friend. The band creates a quiet, swirling atmosphere that almost perfectly mimics the comfort of a long heart-to-heart talk with a trusted confidant.
The key to Braving the Seabed’s warm tones is in the amazing interplay between the band’s guitar players, Kirsty and Mitch (no last names given on the band’s website bio). The soft, lulling guitar sounds create a calming effect, as the melodies and nuances of the songs themselves carry ears through the aural equivalent of rolling hills and valleys.
The disc’s strongest moments come in emotional swells brought on by blossoms of incredible lead guitar work. These swells evolve so subtly from the disc’s dreamy rhythms that it takes multiple listens to fully appreciate how delicate and elaborate the evolution is. Listening to a track like “Walking Across Highrises” is like watching a flower bloom in the spring. At first, the song seems standard enough. Eventually, Kirsty’s angelic vocals glide across the song’s intricate rhythm, slowly gaining in strength and power as the track meanders along. The final two minutes of the song head down a winding soundscape, led by soft and delicate lead guitar that is as powerful as it is beautiful. Eventually, the lead guitar blends itself back in with the rhythm, so that the end of the track finds itself just as unassuming as the beginning.
Experiences like this are repeated throughout the disc. “A Perfect Silence” creates a stark mood, enhanced by a sadly droning slide guitar. Sadness fully sets in when the band instrumentation drops out, leaving a piano and a haunting string section to support the vocals. The guitars quietly chime back in as Rob plaintively complains, “I’m being treated like someone you’d beat on.” “To Sea” builds on a minimal (though pretty) guitar line with more of Kirsty’s cherubic voice, winding and twisting with more amazingly delicate intertwined guitar parts that eventually blend into another softly powerful guitar solo.
Braving the Seabed’s self-titled release falls into a category much like labelmates thestringandreturn. The disc has definite highlights, but the point here is to listen to the disc as one entirely sublime listening experience. The overall effect is breathtaking, with quiet rhythms giving way to emotional guitar swells before fading back again. The highlights of the disc definitely revolve around the band’s amazing lead guitar work, but even those moments lose something when taken out of context from the rest of the disc.
This recording is perfect to put on repeat for those late-night, meaningful conversations. In a perfect world, all thoughts and words would flow as easily as the beauty does from this disc. Braving the Seabed has created a CD that can simply be categorized as “pretty.” This one’s a definite keeper.

Sometimes weird things happen. Things that no one can explain. You should know that I'm not one of those X-Files or Star Trek guys. I don't play any of those card games and I don't have all kinds of Close Encounters paraphernalia. But sometimes weird things happen, like this review thing. Don't you find that strange? What? You don't know what I'm talking about? Oh, well when you check out the review for the Hope 12 you'll know John and I had very similar experiences with similar style music around the same time. You see, sometimes when I get a big stack of CDs I look at the cover of some of them and I try to guess what the band is going to sound like, based on the cover. You may think I am lying, but from the moment I saw this album, I just knew there was going to be a band with sparse vocals and slow meanderings in the various forms of slow rock. Well, I wouldn't say that's what I knew in those exact words, but I could definitely tell that there would be male/female vocals flowing like molasses through the cracks of the songs. The cover just felt like that.

So, I find this band to be very enjoyable, very polished sounding in the way that just makes you know the people behind it know their shit. I guess in a lot of ways it is similar to their American label-mates, Sunday Flood. Similar because this is something that I could see coming out on a bigger-volume indie label like Tiger Style or Merge, but different because it's a bit too aloof to be considered by Capitol, like Sunday Flood could be.

One thing that I didn't get a feel for from the cover was how hokey it was going to feel listening to it. Most of the record is alluring in that it makes you sympathize with it and makes you want to think it's good, even if its not. One point where the siren's lure wears dangerously thin is when Rob's (we're on a first name basis) vocals peak in all their nasal anguish above the particularly meandering "A Perfect Silence".

In the end, I suppose everyday truth is always stranger than the metaphysical and unexplained, and this record is a prime example. More compelling than the obvious psychic bond that John Steinbacher and I had recently is the fact that, even though I don't really care for this record and neither vocalist can really sing, I wouldn't totally blow this band off.

Braving The Seabed is a quartet from Perth in Australia. Or rather was, as a result of staff changes, it adopted the name of Minor Ache. Braving The Seabed belongs to this same scene slowcore Australian fruitful unknown here but over there that people like Sea Life Park, Rebel Astronauts, Light's Surprising Constancy or Art of Fighting, already celebrated earlier with fervor and faith in these pages.

Listen to their album is like taking a wadded uppercut smoothly. The quartet drink the same water that the masters of the genre and takes place almost equivalent of Idaho, Codeine, Early Day Miners or C-Clamp, with perhaps the most gentle warm Pacific can not find anywhere else on the earth. This album comes through the U.S. label SunSeaSky which is already on the disc or Aurore Rien fabulous split-album between Midsummer and Coastal.

If Braving The Seabed Minor Ache is now the group is still not at its first incarnation. The real beginnings date back to 1998 when as Glimmer, the bulk of the group had already shot and released a disc. Glimmer itself was built on the ashes of another, Caterpillar Now, here for the story and to show that music like that and such a quality can not be built in a day.

The quartet consists of Kirsty on vocals, guitar and violin, vocals and Rob on bass, Mitch on guitar and Marty on the drums. The disk atmosphere is calm and soothing but regularly tense and passionate, in the pure lines of nobility slowcore.

This disc was released in 2000 but now in 2003, it has not yet taken one ride and it is high time to adopt it. It was the sensation of listening to find or locate a friend, it seems to know already, we already know the intensity of intimacy that we will be able to share with him, similar to that experienced with disks Codeine , Idaho or Sea Life Park. This is an album that is eaten with soft which began after a long journey. Disc bedside table par excellence, or, perhaps better still a hard travel, the subscriber discman for long crossings alone or in pairs. The drive holiday par excellence, history to keep a bubble intimate shine through which landscapes and nature.

We should not expect to feel at Braving The Seabed exactly the same effect as that in distilled slowcore U.S., Australia is a continent and that permeates the music deeply, to a point where you can almost talk about a scene slowcore / post-rock and the other much more valuable to our ears.

"Tonight is for sleeping 'in the introduction is a great song, sung by Rob. A bit like walking at night under trees and in the Milky Way, after a hot day, because sleep does not come because the pain and sadness we prohibit. It then wandering almost to tears to find answers within ourselves, or at least a little respite. The stars are never as beautiful, as pure as in these times, the flight of a bat becomes a calm unbelievable, as a sign of fate that brings us some thoughts below. Drums, bass and guitars are terrible here, as intense as Codeine or at the Red House Painters. The song was chosen by Rob, just the way from Idaho, but pearl, however, a degree of heat, it sees through the timbre of his voice large empty landscapes, desert and wild Australian feeling in the world and end of isolation. Great song.

'Walking across highrises' has an intro more floating, planing and Kirsty takes over on vocals. It takes some time to acclimatize to his voice, less common and obvious in this kind of music usually reserved for male voices. But little by little the charm and settles trickle becomes a vibrating string on which we walk in balance. It seems to rise towards the sky, the guitars up and one thinks almost Seam. 'The air between' continuing with, and a little more atmospheric and dreamy only.

Rob returned to singing on the very moving 'A Perfect Silence' which after a start eventually dashed off as a crisis of tears that overwhelm us. Moments and shocking. One of the beautiful songs that could be in mourning.

Kirsty vocals on 'the lonesome language' in a straight line, just animated a few curves which cut new landscapes, but little by little and you come over the ridge and a new horizon rises before us, almost drunk and welcomed by a great awakening of guitars. 'Simple' rather s'écoute lying in the grass, drowsy, watching a few white clouds across the blue sky, with a beautiful new rise gradually, as if the wind was rising slowly and the sky was responsible, harbinger of an impending storm that forces us to face and flee to a shelter, while the first heavy drops falling on our shoulders.

Rob returns to the song on 'mapped out in our thoughts' and takes us back directly into the atmosphere at night, half way to Idaho and Early Day Miners. It then passed to a 'To Sea' a little more obscure where Braving The Seabed turns perhaps for the first and only time this album in circles, missing flights possible.

The album then ends on the nine and a half minutes of 'nervous / being made out', two pieces chained shaped diptych, where Braving The Seabed once again demonstrated its expertise in developing in the Australian touch . It is likely that the same type of song played by an American group would eventually collapse on itself or appear to fade, but there is an exotic kind of faith that has kept it standing here.

This eponymous album Braving The Seabed may not be the absolute masterpiece of the genre hoped, but still a very good album highly recommended to any fan of slowcore, as a group slowcore talent comparable to braving the seabed can be counted on the fingers of the hand.

For the record, the group disbanded because Kirsty and Mitch have been twins and were living in Perth, while Rob and Marty moved to Melbourne, across Australia. Rob and Marty continue to play under the name of Minor Ache, continuing Braving The Seabed and we can expect great things as my two favorite songs of this album are sung by Rob. We will keep you informed.