Album Review: We Lost The Sea - A Single Flower
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Five years in the making, Australian instrumental post-rock outfit We Lost the Sea, have finally followed up 2019’s pre-plague Triumph & Disaster with this new collection of tunes, A Single Flower. Clocking in at around seventy-minutes, yet consisting of barely half-a-dozen tracks, the album is a statement of intent from these six Aussies, and if you caught the band at the Damnation weekend of 2022, where they pulled double-duties, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what A Single Flower holds in store.
Opening with If They Had Hearts’ simple melancholy and series of ascendingly morose repetitive lines, the tune grows, almost organically, through the addition of percussive elements, building guitars and increasing tempo, volume and intensity. Spacious and sparse up to four-minute mark, there’s a sudden urgency as the boisterous guitars attract everything else as though a force of gravity. Then nothing. Only those open spaces and ominous, though light-touch, keyboards sketching out the vastness of the void in which we find ourselves. It’s both chilling and uplifting at the same time, drawing an emotional reaction from the listener at every turn.
The ten-minute epic A Dance with Death had been the recipient of a promo video and continues the musical vastness, though this time using heavy chugs and fat, pulsing bass lines. A cycling riff all but creates its own gravity during the first half of the track, which quickly switches to a clean and more spacious mood at the mid-point. Intersecting lines offer a fragility leading to hypnotic moments, until they themselves surrender their ground allowing funky bass lines to carry it to the climax with an earworm of a progression.
As you would expect the band’s musical delivery is exemplary throughout. The triple guitar construction courtesy of Mark Owen, Matt Harvey and Carll Whitbread play off each other as they build strong foundations and towering structures. Mathew Kelly’s keys compliment and supplement We Lost the Sea’s sound, adding greater touches of shade to an already extensive aural palette; while rhythm section of long-term bassist Kieran Elliot and drummer Alasdair Belling – here making his recording debut with the band – lock everything down.
Although Bloom Murmurations at First Light might be almost five-minutes longer than A Dance… it doesn’t have the same epic feel to it; rather its uplifting guitars and hard-hitting cosmic sounds have something of an intimate ambience. Whereas Everything Here is Black and Blinding is significantly shorter, yet is built around an atmospheric opening, creepy vibes that offer an almost industrial feel, and some of A Single Flower’s loosest passages. Abandoned are the crisp tight lines of the rest of the record, in favour of fuzzy low end and resonating gothic lines. I was reminded of The Red Weed from War of the Worlds at time on this one.
Sophie Trudeau of Canadian post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor guests on the orchestral interlude that is The Gloaming, before the album enters its final strait and the ambitious twenty-seven-minute composition that is Blood Will Have Blood.
An amalgam of all that has gone before, We Lost the Sea is able to shake loose the shackles and, unbound, explore every avenue to its fullest. Ideas that would previously have been drawn to an unhelpful conclusion are now open to grown organically to the point of exhaustion. There’s some of the record’s heaviest material on offer and, dispute the weighty run-time, Blood… never seems to wear out its welcome. Slow and measured, it wends its way through shifts in style and mood until it reaches the point where the end is in sight and, with five-minutes remain, A Single Flower seems to coalesce into a singular vision.
We Lost the Sea will be back on Blighty’s shore come August and their appearance at ArcTangGent festival where, it’s said, they will perform the Departure Songs album as they did at the Night of Salvation back in 2022. As with that show, the band will be playing consecutive days, so will give them opportunity to air some of this new material.
Great review. Thank you.