The latest single from Los Angeles based act The Sea At Midnight has an almost prophetic quality to it. Like a chilling an omen to an impending drought and climate crisis, the mesmerizing track brings its smoldering post punk textures and guitarist Vince Grant’s plaintive vocals.Comprising ominous guitar lines from the get go, you’re taken to a parched, post apocalyptic landscape. Grant’s achingly droning lyrics conjure images of cracked earth, desiccated landscapes; the skeletal rhythms summon visions of our deep disconnect from the pleas of the natural world.
His words are heavy-handed sloganeering for impressions — withering trees, seas of ash, skies drowning in smoke — vivid but abstract.The subject matter is gruesome as hell, but The Sea At Midnight’s sonic craftsmanship makes “Wait For Rain” hypnotic, if not meditative. Shimmering guitar work meets undulating synth washes and primal drum patterns shared in a luscious soundscape. Classic gothic post punk and new wave command a lot of respect, but Grant’s portentous baritone prevents the production from falling into the trap of pastiche, with nuanced modern touches.
The instrumental surges batter like a new whirlwind of hot wind from the desert and the choruses swell with a horrid grandness like watching the flames engulf the horizon. Wait For Rain actually manages to make its thematic core viscerally felt, as the feeling of a world getting eaten by the effects of environmental negligence. It’s also a strange, solemn beauty to behold in its doomed poeticism, that there’s no easy, gentle way for such a vividly transportive space to confront one of our time’s most vital existential crossroads, and yet there it is, The Sea At Midnight having carved just such a space. “Wait For Rain” is a bleak and haunting clarion call, a demand that we stop pretending and face reality before it’s too late.
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