The folks at Birds Robe have been busy re-issuing their catalogue, meaning that gorgeous looking CD’s filled with big post rock sounds have been dropping through my letterbox. With each dull thud on the door mat comes another collection of songs by a band I have not heard of from Austraila. This time around it is We Lost the Sea from Campbelltown NSW – a destination I used to see on a train when I was working collecting door to door for a charity in the Sydney suburbs decades ago.
Departure songs is the bands 3rd album and was originally released in 2015. We Lost the Sea is an instrumental band who may be described as post rock – two words together that I do not really understand although I type them often. It would be more accurate to describe the musicians as modern classical or composers of soundtracks to their own non visual stories.
This album has an oddly inspirational theme. Inspirational as each of the 5 pieces sonically depicts heroic endeavours by humans against great adversity. Odd because each of the events ends in disaster. The beautifully rendered accompanying booklet tells the tale of each brave person or group. For the tactile amongst you the matt finish of the booklet is especially pleasing to the touch.
“A Gallant Gentleman” opens the album and may be familiar to some as it was featured on “After Life” Ricky Gervais’s brilliantly sombre comedy dram on Netflix as well as many other promotional bits and pieces. It features the uplifting voices of a Sydney girl’s choir and is a snip at 6 minutes. The muse here was Captain Lawrence Oates whose final words are probably more famous than his name. He was on the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole and sacrificed himself to save his friends walking, riddled with frostbite into the icy wastes uttering “ I am just going outside now. I may be sometime”. It is that kind of goosepimple raising daring do that this project oozes. Oates track is grand on a scale that the icy tundra of Antarctica evokes. The beautiful choral voices give even an old atheist cynic like me the sense of Oates walking towards some spiritual peace knowing that he is saving his friends. From track one it is evident that this is an emotional rollercoaster of an album.
Anyone who watched “Chernobyl” the series has seen the telling of the great sacrifice made by ordinary men and women in the Ukraine in the wake of cowardly political wrangling. “Bogatyri” is inspired by the three man “Suicide Squad” who went into the contaminated water of the stricken reactor to open the floodgates to stop tonnes of radioactive steam flooding Ukraine and the rest of Europe. They succeeded in darkness after their lamp was extinguished dying an agonising death ten days later. Their only reward was knowing their families would be looked after by the Soviet regime. “Bogatyri” is the name of a Ukrainian legend about three brave knights of old. The music has an Eastern European feel without going full on Ukie and the tension mounts and mounts mirroring the three men grasping and trudging through liquid death. The stabs of the guitars around the 8-minute mark increased my heartrate as I tried to imagine the horror that they went through in Spring 1986.
Rock music –especially metal likes to illustrate tales of terror and gore and we as fans relish the macabre. Tales such as this need no serial killer lyrics or blastbeats and necrophiliac illustration. This is the tale of normal men sacrificing all for the greater good in a mundane way. Men walk into a flooded chamber. Turn a valve. Walk out. Die. Hidden from sight. No publicity for decades. Horrifying. The beauty of what they offered to the human race is celebrated here with great effect. The final echoes of the guitars fizz like a Geiger counter.
The third piece starts eerily quiet. The sound of a needle on a record and a sonic echo is joined by the sound of breathing through a tube, trickling water and muffled voices. “The Last Dive of David Shaw”. 50 year old Australian Shaw was one of only ten people who dived to a depth of 250 meters in the underwater caves . The booklet gives it the perspective that more people have walked on the moon. Whilst making a record breaking dive, he discovered the body of one of his predecessors lost in the Dead Zone. Whilst bringing up the body Shaw became tangled in equipment lines and died. Both bodies were brought up days later by a Dive Team retrieving equipment from the deep. He had been thought lost forever. The quote from his wife after his death is as inspiring as it is heart wrenching. Give it a google or better yet buy this album.
The music that follows his last dive is a mix of light and airy gentle plucked guitar strings that depict the weightlessness of travelling through water and the wonder and excitement he must have felt as he descended into the black knowing that he was breaking records. Lurking in the background is a lower, darker, Morriconesque guitar line that seems to represent the increase in atmospheric pressure and the deep blackness of the deadly environment. As the track builds there are flashes of colour that, to me, represent marine life looking quizzically at this strange being with tanks and lines entering their space. As things darken I can imagine the moment he finds the corpse of his colleague and makes the decision to fight with it back to the surface. The guitar becomes more urgent, a kick for the surface and a hammond organ joins in to try to propel the pair out of the cave and to the surface. It feels like a triumph is a few flipper kicks away. It is at this point that I do a quick google and find on Youtube footage of David Shaws last dive from a South African news channel. This includes a phone call from David Shaw to the parents of the dead diver he found promising to bring their son home after they lost him to the Boesmansgat cave in the northern Cape some ten years before. Whaaat! This is making everything even more real. Here is the guy I am imagining about to make what will be his final dive. HIs final moments from his helmet camera are on the clip. Harrowing. I go back to the music.
The track fades into a gentle piano melody on the We Lost the Sea track to show his final drift into unconsciousness and death. Wow!
The final two pieces propel us into another unforgiving environment as we join the doomed crew of Challenger. The first track – an epic of 23 minutes and 45 seconds is titled “Flight” whilst the second near nine- minute piece is “A Swan Song”. The Challenger disaster is one that resonates most with e due to being a 12-year-old boy when it happened. The pictures of those seven astronauts erupting into flame and crashing to the ground shocked and enthralled me at the time. Disaster occurred just 73 seconds into the mission. About the time it has taken me to write this paragraph.
The opening 6 minutes of Flight has a lone male voice – possibly an astronaut talking about missions to space – my knowledge is not great enough to fully understand what he was saying and I was distracted by the music backing him. A mix of electronics and guitars building a sense of travel beyond the stars – a sci fi meets inspirational documentary soundtrack that seems even more poignant as I write this on the day that William Shatner goes into orbit courtesy of the Amazonian king. The 73 seconds of flight is represented by a growing urgent string section building beneath a lilting clean guitar strum. I can imagine those shots of NASA ignition depicted in slo-mo as the explosion occurs at the bottom of the craft and gravity is defied. This is a 20th century mythical tale where Icarus is thwarted not by arrogance but by a faulty O- Ring valve and an oddly cold Florida morning. The use of percussion here gives the feeling of the mechanics of the craft – the rim shots or block hits (I can’t tell which they are) reminds me that those 7 souls were in a cannister of steel strapped to a bomb and makes the craziness and mad bravery of space travel even more real.
Some 12 minutes in they are airborne or at least that is how it seems. A soaring guitar carries them up like an American eagle – you can almost imagine a starts and stripes image flashing across the sky in their wake. It grows and grows and then seems to lie suspended in the sky amidst a reverberating guitar chord. Then an echoey electronic sound breaks the calm, pitchshifted and reminiscent of old kid’s sci fi shows. It is joined by a high bassline that reminds me of Survivor before a louder riff and the sound of Mission Control take over. The crew still sound upbeat and the music like in the other tracks gives the false sense of hope. Behind it all there is a melancholy string section played on keys that suggests it’s all gonna go to shit. The drums kick in and this can only be the point that the seal is ruptured and horror unfolds on the screen of Mission Control. Trumpets and cellos burst through urgently as the world of men is rendered useless by a tiny break in scientific fabric. The voices of people back on earth can be heard “They were here but now they’re gone” over the sound of chaos. “We will provide you with more information as it becomes available – this is mission control- Houston”
It is only through reading and researching as I listen that I learned that some of the Astronauts did not die during the explosion but were killed on impact as the capsule hit the ocean. Those last seconds must have been terrifying.
“A Swansong “dignifies the deaths of the 6 astronauts and one civilian with a sombre yet uplifting piece. The chaos is replaced with a tranquil rock beat and a gentle groove. The epitome of folks burning bright and short which, perhaps ironic in the circumstances of Challenger, rings true for all the protagonists depicted in “Departures”. All the brave souls left this world in pursuit of making things better for others – some on a grand scale, some on a much smaller but perhaps even more poignant one. The track grows into a crescendo of post rock tremolo guitars and I gotta say I am fighting some eye leakage here. Sometimes it is good in a world full of cynicism and hatred to remember that sacrifice is necessary. “Future does not belong to the fainthearted – it belongs to the brave”. I can’t believe that I finish this review with a Ronald Reagan quote – as does the album.
Stunning.
(9/10 Matt Mason)
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