On Friday night in Melbourne, fans of Sydney post-metal/rock six piece We Lost The Sea saw a blinding performance, easily one of their top four shows of the 24 that I’ve seen. It’s easy to simply think “gee, they played well tonight”, but that ignores the depth of what was really happening. But more of that soon.
“Two Bands, Six Guitars”
That’s how I would have sold this show to me. Countless bands produce a solid sound with just one guitar, but three is where it’s at for complex layering. Tasmanian band Follow put in a stellar 40-minute performance showcasing the variety in their style of post-rock. While there was a “traditional” lead and rhythm guitar, the third took on a role of both plus what I thought of as classic back-up singers, adding accents and depth in different measures. This added a level of originality more difficult to attain when you have no vocals.
Playing most of their 2023 debut album, Old Haunts, and new track ‘Cherry Blossoms in the Front Yards, Forever’, their brand of crescendo-core was filled with beautiful melodies and brute force, neatly joined with “spooky stuff” to keep the flow going. I wasn’t familiar with their music, but I enjoyed it more than God is an Astronaut who I saw earlier this year. Check them out on Bandcamp.
Follow. Photo: @tonyr.photos
Just two years after the tragic passing of singer Chris Torpy, We Lost The Sea released their first instrumental album, Departure Songs. This has become an internationally acclaimed landmark record in the post-rock world; but it also became somewhat of a ball and chain for the band. After ten years, it’s the sound many wanted to hear remade over and over, and despite the band continuing to evolve and grow in all areas, fans around the world were clamoring to hear Departure Songs live when WLTS were able to tour overseas. Interviews focused on a ten-year-old album, and not on just released A Single Flower.
So, when they announced a short East Coast Australian tour that would consist wholly of the new record, it was going to be interesting to see how crowds would react. And now I’m going to try to capture that in words that go beyond “That was fucking incredible! What a night!”
We Lost The Sea. Photo: @tonyr.photos
Opening with a spoken word recording, guitarist Mark Owen took to the stage amid a huge cheer and started to strum the opening riff to ‘If They Had Hearts’. In that second, it was clear the crowd knew this album and embraced it. The rest of the band were cheered to the stage one by one, and we were off on a 90-minute journey of some of the best music you will hear.
It’s worth saying how humble the guys from WLTS are, and how genuinely moved they are by their fans. When the connection is strong with the crowd, you can see it in the way they perform – the joy that’s on stage – and this snowballs as the two sides of the photographers’ moat create an energy greater than the sum of its parts.
One such moment was when the crowd started clapping with the drum beat as it entered in ‘Everything is Black and Binding’ I saw Matt Harvey and Kieran Elliott with smiles that told me that really meant something to them.
We Lost The Sea. Photo: @tonyr.photos
Having played most of the album, they took a short rest break before returning to play ‘Blood Will Have Blood’. But how do you engage a crowd for 27 minutes with one tune full of peaks and troughs? Good question.
There is an unwritten rule with progressive instrumental music that when the song goes quiet, and you know it’s not the end, you smugly scoff at the folks who burst into applause when there is still one more crescendo to come. Guilty as charged. But it turns out it’s not a bad thing to go off after a mid-song climax; and in this case, Mark is not shy of encouraging the crowd to cheer wildly when he’s having a few bars rest.
Of course, that’s not enough on its own to keep an audience engaged. The tune is full of melodies, riffs, and some incredible, thunderous and aggressive guitar work from Harvey. Throughout the set, newest member Alasdair Belling smacked the fuck out of those skins and cymbals, and Elliot on bass, Carl Whitbread on guitar and Matthew Kelly on keys were their usual awesome selves.
We Lost The Sea. Photo: Gilbert Potts
Not only did the crowd hungrily devour every drop of ‘Blood’, they wanted more. The set was over, but no one was going home, and after some uncertainty we were treated to ‘The Last Dive of David Shaw’ in an encore.
I still can’t explain exactly what happened, but all the stars aligned that night. There was an atmosphere of hope in the performance, a departure from the more pessimistic tone of Triumph and Disaster. It was a night when the band could finally mentally move on from Departure Songs, and it may be ten years before we hear any of it live again. That’s not a sad thing: it’s an affirmation of the strength of their ongoing writing and live performances; and of the connection between them and their devoted followers.
