After selling out a first show in Melbourne at the Toff, France’s Alcest are appearing tonight upstairs at the John Curtin Hotel, joined by local acts Encircling Sea and Heirs. The crowd outside on Lygon Street are enjoying the summer evening, decked out in a vast assortment of obscure noise, metal and post-rock band shirts. Before long the sound of blast beats from upstairs draws them in, signaling the start of Encircling Sea’s set.
Melbourne’s Encircling Sea are painstakingly slow at times, the synth wandering amongst the brutal guitar and bass adds an unsettling ambience to their doom-sludge sound. Screeching vocals and judicious use of cymbal crashes punctuate the claustrophobic songs, eerie synth chords and minimalistic drumming tying everything together, touching on a diverse range of genres, from black metal to doom to post rock and noise. The place is packed out right from the start, Encircling Sea well deserving of the audience.
Heirs are another hard band to pin down sonically, lurking somewhere underneath that umbrella descriptor of ‘post rock’, though tinted with elements of electronica and industrial, among others. They begin their set with a synth intro, sounding a little bit like noises from an old, broken radio. The rest of the band fall in, building to a pulsating crescendo, filling the room and the crowd’s eardrums with every available frequency.
Guitarist Brent Stegeman stands at the front of the stage staring intensely into the audience, throwing himself into the music with a jarring, almost mechanical ferocity. On the other side of bass player Laura Bradfield is guitarist Ian Jackson, formerly of Damn Arms. He stands further back on stage, partly in shadow, hunched over his own instrument and an array of pedals. Second track “Burrow”, from their 2010 album Fowl, is the standout in the set.
Theremin player Miles Brown is astonishing. It shrieks and oscillates, his hands moving through the air with an almost robotic precision, subtle changes in pitch expertly commanded. The skill with the instrument that Brown shows captivates everyone in the place. He coaxes an amazing array of noise out of his instrument, the theremin’s ethereal sound weaving through the rest of the band’s more percussive elements.
Later in the set, “Fowl”, the title track off of the same album, builds from minimal roots, Damien Coward’s metronomic drum beat punches through the organic walls of synth and guitar, blending in to create a throbbing, Giger-esque cacophony. Heirs create a beautiful and haunting soundscape, Bradfield’s bass and Coward’s drumming pinning down the tempo amid the more ambient elements of their songs. Equal parts hypnotic and threatening, they hold the audience firmly entranced as they finish in a hail of feedback, opening the stage for Alcest, the audience cramming further into the John Curtin band room.
Formerly considered a black metal band, the departure of earlier members left frontman Neige to develop as a solo artist, driven by his visions as a child of an unknown world beyond our scope of reality. The theatrical, sometimes epic songs seem to draw on a vast array of influences, with hints of shoegaze, various sub genres of metal and even the wall of noise in some of the instrumental parts calling to mind My Bloody Valentine.
Alcest clearly enjoy a respectable following in Melbourne, as the full 300-capacity venue, their second packed out show here, can attest. After the doom-driven Encircling Sea and the heavy bass lines of Heirs, Alcest bring a subtle but definite brightening of the atmosphere. Their half-shrieked, dream-like vocals stand out against the earlier purely instrumental bands also. The sound is a little washed out on their first song, but by the second it’s been sorted. Alcest are definitely loud, playing with a fervent energy, the crowd responding enthusiastically. Neige’s testament to his childhood dreamscape has created an interesting and sonically unique band, enlivening the sometimes awkward space on stage in the John Curtin’s rather open band room on a Thursday night.
– Shaun Thatcher
