Live Review: Sleepmakeswaves w/ The Contortionist & Tangled Thoughts of Leaving @ The Triffid

It’s been a massive journey for Sydney instrumental post-rockers Sleepmakeswaves after their sophomore album ‘Love of Cartography’ launched them into the upper echelons of Australian Music, scoring them critical acclaim as well as triple j, ARIA, and AIR award nominations. Since then the album has taken the lads on four European tours, two American tours, and a whopping 10 Australian tours, but all good things must come to an end.

The night opened slowly with punters making their way in from the light drizzle outside, building an interesting crowd of devoted rockers and their less extreme counterparts. If there was something to be said about the audience these bands draw it’s how incredible it is to see the extreme and more moderate head bangers unify for some incredible bloody music.

First on stage was Tangled Thoughts of Leaving, my very first introduction to them and I was pretty impressed! They’re another instrumental band but where Sleepmakeswaves substitutes vocals for strong melodic guitar, Tangled Thoughts of Leaving substitutes trashing synthesisers. Nothing showcases this more than the setup of their act, pushing a huge, complicated-looking synth to the front of stage. For the whole set the mental keyboardist acted as if his synth monolith contorted his body with each note, it was sick! If you ever get the opportunity to get out and see Tangled Thoughts of Leaving, do it!

Next up were Americans The Contortionist and the only band on the bill with a vocalist, but you could be mistaken otherwise. The way Michael Lessard used his voice was like an instrument regularly fading into the mix of the entire scope of the music. Many fists held high to the sonic picture these legends painted.

Then, Sleepmakeswaves. As the quartet took their places the iconic drone of Perfect Detonator built plenty of tension in the muscles of the audience which was only released when the band came down on their instruments, letting loose a huge wall of sound that knocked the crowd backwards.

The best parts of the set were the massive amount of energy put in by Sleepmakeswaves. Seeing bassist Alex reeling back and forth to every beat is intense, the barely audible screams of guitarist Otto Wick-Green added an awesome extra layer of sound nonexistent in their records, and their drummer Tim destroyed his kit. The clarity of the music, hearing live each guitar tone and each cymbal crash, is an experience that pales in significance to the recordings.

The ‘Traced In Constellations’ tour was billed as a final goodbye to one of Australia’s most prolific instrumental-rock albums of all time, as the band that created it heads into the studio for a third outing. The album’s swan song was an incredible testament not only to the album or the band, but the genre and legacy that Sleepmakeswaves creates with fellow incredible musicians like The Contortionist and Tangled Thoughts of Leaving.

Check out our Photo Gallery HERE and our interview with their guitarist Otto Wicks-Green HERE