Artist: We Lost The Sea
Album: Triumph & Disaster
Genre: Post-Rock, Post-Metal, Instrumental
Country: Australia
Release date: 4th of November, 2019
Released via Bird’s Robe Records
Cover Artwork © Bird’s Robe Records 2019
Four years after their last album Departure Songs, We Lost The Sea released their fourth studio album Triumph & Disaster. Again, an album with long songs, deep sound structures and a big spectrum of different sounds for their listeners. But my main question was, is this album as good as their last, which is one of my favourites in this genre within this decade.
Again, a big main topic dominates the sound of their album. In Departure Songs, with every song they honour a special group or single person for dedicating their life to the greater good of humanity. This concludes in a very dark and claustrophobic, but very emotional and sensitive sound structure. With this album, they try to tell us the story of the fragile earth, threatened by the human behaviour and the climate change. A rough topic. Let’s see, if they can tell this story to the listener.
In contrast to their last album, We Lost The Sea begins more powerful and harder with their 15 Minutes long first song “Towers”. The instruments are very fast on point, no long introduction, directly in your ears, but then it gets slower, playful, a piano joins after half of the song, clearly hearable with hard riffs in the background. A good beginning for their album. With “A Beautiful Collapse” they start very normal, soft and slow which changes step by step to a sound which feels more risky. The whole song is harder, but it keeps his playful elements… until the song collapses in the end. “Dust” begins like a sandstorm in an apocalyptic wasteland, but then you enter a Jazz bar in the ruins of an old city. A completely different feeling, a different way to tell us a story with musical elements. Their sixth song “The Last Sun” is a song which I would call a typical We Lost The Sea song compared to their last album. It reminds me a lot of Departure Songs in a positive way, a good memory from the past. And something new enters their style with their last song “Mother’s Hymn”, vocals. After the death of their vocalist Chris Torpy, they didn’t use vocals anymore, but it’s a final statement for the topic of this album: “We rose with the sun and fell into disgrace, We bled the earth dry while guilt soaked through our veins, Are we really too late?”
The album is lesser melancholic and claustrophobic then Departure Songs, but it has his own style which it tries to achieve. The combination of sounds that make you feel threatened about our future, depressive vibes and hope that show us it isn’t too late to do the right thing – this message of the album is pretty good . But sometimes I missed something, sometimes it feels too long. Some songs feel like stories from a narrator who is not able to cut them to decent lengths. People who like Post-Rock/Post-Metal and they hear the first time of this band, should start with Departure Songs, but this album can nearly stand the ground with its precursor. But with Triumph & Disaster We Lost The Sea showed us, that they are fine composers with their own unique style. It was a pleasant journey.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
8/10
As usual, we added the favorite track(s) to our Transcended Review Playlist.
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