LIVE REVIEW: We Lost The Sea @ Electric Ballroom, London
The queue snakes its way down the Camden Road in sweltering sunshine at 6pm for WE LOST THE SEA‘s London headliner, part of their first tour proper of the UK & Europe. Given their outsized impact and popularity in the post-rock community, it’s perhaps surprising that this is their first set of non-festival dates in the country. It’s a stacked line-up, put together in concert with the organisers behind ArcTanGent and Damnation festivals and the successful industry insider podcast 2 Promoters 1 Pod, with two bands heavily pushed by those promoters on the support bill. Venues elsewhere in the UK found themselves sold out or upgraded to larger rooms at the prospect. Here, a forced curfew for a Slam Dunk South afterparty at the Electric Ballroom does result in a tempered initial audience size, with the show wrapped up by 9:30pm. Still, there’s a sizeable cohort of diehards who got the early start memo, eager for an evening of emotionally intense post-rock and metal.
Twelve months prior to this show, DIMSCÛA were a week out from releasing their debut album Dust Eater, a labour of love for a group of friends with no expectations of high listenership & success, or even of playing a single live show. What a difference a year makes. The trajectory to this point has been unorthodox – an early shout-out on the aforementioned podcast and a packed ArcTanGent debut gig catapulting them to large stages such as this from nothing. But on tonight’s evidence, it’s more than justified.
The band smash through the four songs on that record, material they appear to live and breathe on stage – synchronised headbanging abounds, with guitarist Adam Campbell-Train mouthing along to every lyric and counterpart Sam Correa wearing a beaming smile throughout. The audience fully buys in, remarkably so for a 6:20pm start. The quiet instrumental guitar break that precedes On Being and Nothingness reduces the crowd to complete silence, unprecedented for an opening act. There are some raw edges evident, unsurprisingly given the lack of touring miles for the outfit as a whole. Alex Rowland‘s vocals are impassioned but lose some stamina midway through the set. But overall, this is an accomplished performance. DIMSCÛA prove that a keen ear for simple melodies and riffs coupled with genuine emotional heft can take you a long, long way towards great post-metal, outshining many longer-lived contemporaries.
Rating: 8/10
Riding a similar wave of acclaim in post-rock circles are OVERHEAD, THE ALBATROSS, the Irish four-piece grabbing attention with their 2024 masterpiece I Leave You This, leading to festival appearances worldwide and notable support slots. Their live show draws heavily from that album, presented in near-sequential order, with projected visuals on a tiny screen behind the band. Squeezed into a scant 35-minute set, the band cram as many highlights as they can into their show, with half the songs compressed to their second-half crescendos only.
It takes a few minutes to properly lock in the mix and the rhythm, with the band’s new touring drummer effortfully grappling with the polyrhythms. But the touring miles and experience win out. The piece of A4 brandished by Luke Daly for the spoken word-to-post-hardcore anguish of Your Last Breath may be more theatrical than functional by this point, but it’s still effective. So, too, the eulogising projected messages and singalong lyrics that conclude Paul Lynch, which has much of the audience in full voice and more than a couple with moist eyes. The shorter cuts of the songs rob a little of their emotional payoffs, but it’s probably a stronger move for a 35-minute support slot to hit all the high notes. Really, though, OVERHEAD, THE ALBATROSS deserves a less restricted canvas.
Rating: 8/10
Given the long wait for a first headline tour of the UK, not to mention the expense of schlepping halfway across the planet to do so, WE LOST THE SEA could potentially coast on fan adoration, bash out some favourites, and call it a day. But instead, they’re intent to treat the crowd to a proper spectacle, heralding their set with the opening minutes of Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds – a bold choice for any band. The six-piece take the stage one by one over the course of the first few minutes of opener If They Had Hearts, silhouetted figures against red light. Led by guitarist Mark Owen‘s riffwork, loaded with gravitas, that song escalates into full-volume viscerality, augmented by a stunning synchronised light show.
Tonight, the band are keen to foreground last year’s A Single Flower, opening with three songs from that record. The musicianship is in lockstep throughout, the band cast as imperious figures at the front of the stage – particularly guitarist Matt Harvey, who towers over the crowd atop the stage monitors, his fretwork a strident counterpoint to Owen‘s more delicate, tortured expression. The trick to WE LOST THE SEA‘s instrumental post-rock is the inch-perfect pacing, always timing the escalations and releases to a tee. On this front, drummer Alasdair Belling is the band’s MVP, deftly finding both interesting textures and controlling the energy and the audience with aplomb.
At its most full-blooded, this feels more like post-metal than post-rock. The more sedate crowd favourite A Gallant Gentleman from Departure Songs gets a good airing, but it’s Bogatyri from that album that hits hardest, repeatedly going up another gear when you think it’s reached its pinnacle to whip your hair back again. The “encore” song, Blood Will Have Blood, clocks in at half an hour that goes by in a rush – and there aren’t many half-hour songs that can hold attention and sustain continual headbanging this well. As the band depart the stage after 90 minutes, you wish it could just keep going another hour.
Rating: 9/10
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