BRAIDS – Flourish//Perish

Artist: BRAIDS
Album Title: Flourish//Perish
Released: 20 Aug 2013
Label: Flemish Eye Records
Website: braidsmusic.com

BRAIDS is a contemporary shawl of enchanting melodies, consisting of high school friends from the Great White North.  Since their 2011 debut release, Native Speaker, they have taken a much-refined leap—musically and emotionally—that has quantified their second release, Flourish//Perish, a collective maelstrom of sonic grace. Think dark sailing through vividly lush soundscapes of singing fireflies to only come ashore and realize you were only dreaming.

It’s hard to define BRAIDS when their sound sweeps over traditional divisions of a band, eloping up and meshing out into a vocally driven ballad of youthful resolve and wakefulness. Their name alone has unquestionably spawned these thoughts into a single word, but lyrically, “it’s a slow and steady growth filled with ebb and flow”, just another settled reflection from a band who opted out of college to pursue their passion.  Towards the end of the track “Amends”, vocalist Raphaelle Standell-Preston softly presses forward with, “Though the mind can only know it…It is the heart that surely shows it…while the body tries to hold it…While the soul is here to mold it.”

Flourish//Perish has set itself set apart and makes poignant a certain achievement in loss or  “falling down again…in my ego’s bed” and speaks beautifully of the layers we must peel back in ourselves and examine. There’s a great contrast between the two albums and I would recommend giving both a listen and checking out Preston’s side project, Blue Hawaii.

Reviewed by David Rivera