We Lost the Sea – A Single Flower (Review)

This is the fifth album from Australian post-rock band We Lost the Sea.

A Single Flower contains 70 minutes of expressive instrumental post-rock. It’s a huge work, culminating in a 27-minute finale that’s an entire world unto itself. We Lost the Sea weave deep emotion into the very fibre of A Single Flower, providing the listener with an experience to remember.

A Single Flower is an album that takes the listener on a journey over the course of its lengthy duration. From darkness to light, from despair to hope, it’s an experience that is affecting and nuanced. We Lost the Sea are experts at crafting textured, immersive epics; A Single Flower delivers this, and more.

These are broad, comprehensively populated soundscapes, filled with rich character and expressive feeling. The music screams quality, and at no point do the band let these quality levels drop. Even the interlude track – The Gloaming – is worth its brief 3-minute duration, not the least part of this is down its guest violin, from Sophie Trudea of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Powerful stuff.

Each song contains an ocean’s worth of worldbuilding, atmospheric depth, and emotive weight. The music ebbs and flows, builds and subsides, soars and falls. As it moves through its running time, there’s tension, drama, yearning, heartbreak, melancholy, anticipation, madness, beauty, and much, much more. We Lost the Sea paint their emotional portraits broadly, but precisely. There is a lot to take in across these well-rendered vistas, thus ensuring repeat visits to these shores.

A progressive, post-rock masterpiece. Whether you hyperfocus on one particular facet of the music, or let the whole thing just wash over you and carry you away, A Single Flower is a record not to be missed.

Essential listening.