It can feel like We Lost The Sea move at the same glacial pace as their music. It’s been six years since the Australian post-rockers’ excellent ‘Triumph & Disaster’ last paired exquisite crescendos with emotional turmoil but on their fifth album ‘A Single Flower’, we’re treated to a slow-burning, beautiful exploration of the emotional spectrum.
Its six songs occupy 70 minutes of real estate, so it’s an undertaking that requires as much patience as ever, but it is also a richly rewarding experience that threatens to climb to the heights scaled by ‘Departure Songs’ a decade ago.
If They Had Hearts opens solemnly with a simple guitar motif that, as with all good post-rock, is hit upon repeatedly throughout without ever reaching the point of tedium.
It becomes a crushing maelstrom, the riffs swirling around its evolving frame while drum fills cascade and synths flow. There are shades of ‘Departure Songs’ highlight A Gallant Gentleman about the LP’s centrepiece track Bloom (Murmurations At First Light) as it sprawls over 13 plus minutes.
As a whole ‘A Single Flower’ deftly captures the band’s spirit of defiance and quiet revulsion at a world gone off the rails, with compassion and nuance tossed aside for manufactured, pre-packaged outrage. It all comes to a head with the 27 minute closer Blood Will Have Blood. While it trades in the classic quiet-loud post-rock dynamic, the overriding sense here is that We Lost The Sea are drawing on genuine emotion and deep caring to formulate something that captures the hopeless mood of the world.
There are bright moments peppered throughout ‘A Single Flower’, such as the glimmers of hope that dot Everything Here Is Black and Blinding, but overall it’s a sobering album that asks us to consider what we have lost, laying down the challenge of its rediscovery in arresting fashion.
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