Blackwater Holylight with supports. June 19, Melbourne. Word Mark J. Pics Dan Mckay. "The whole performance was flawless in the way that the best live sets are flawless — not sterile, not overworked, but precise where precision matters and loose where looseness serves the song"

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT / SOLKYRI / TREEBEARD. 

"The whole performance was flawless in the way that the best live sets are flawless — not sterile, not overworked, but precise where precision matters and loose where looseness serves the song"
Words by Mark J., photos by Dan McKay.

Corner Hotel, Melbourne — June 19

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The Corner Hotel on a cold June Friday, and there are slight gaps in the room that shouldn't be there. Not a disaster, not a remotely empty house, but for a band of Blackwater Holylight's calibre on their first Australian run — and with Melbourne's doom and doomgaze community being the size and passion that it is — the attendance sits somewhere between puzzling and quietly frustrating. Dark Mofo was still burning through its final week in Hobart, which may have pulled bodies south. Whatever the reason, the room that showed up was the right room, and what they were given in return was one of the better sets this city has seen in some time.

(For context on the band themselves, the pre-show interview conducted earlier in the day is linked below — it adds dimension to what follows.)

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Treebeard opened and immediately established that this was not going to be a night that rushed anything. The Melbourne post-rock (mostly) instrumental outfit builds slowly and they build deliberately — the kind of band that understands a room has to be prepared before it can be moved, and who treat that preparation as part of the craft rather than an obstacle to it. 

Their set accumulated weight the way good post-rock should, through patience and architecture rather than dynamics deployed mechanically, crescendo arriving not because the formula demanded it but because the music had actually earned it. There's a cinematic quality to what Treebeard do that could easily tip into wallpaper and never does — they keep just enough tension alive in the quieter passages that you stay with them, leaning forward slightly, waiting for the next shift. 

A strong opening set from a band who know exactly what they're doing and have the discipline to not do more than necessary.

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Solkyri came at it from a different angle entirely. Where Treebeard built horizontally — wide, patient, expansive — Solkyri work in tighter gradients of tension, their instrumental post-rock carrying something more urgent underneath the surface, a current of unease that keeps the music from ever fully resolving. 

The muscular Sydney outfit have been at this long enough to have shed any tendency toward the obvious move, and it showed: transitions that didn't announce themselves, dynamics that shifted without fanfare, a set that felt genuinely considered rather than assembled from the genre's available parts. 

The kind of instrumental band that earns your attention incrementally and holds it without ever explaining why.

Both support bands were genuinely extraordinary, and both understood the room and the occasion. But here's the thought that surfaced and refused to leave: Blackwater Holylight are a band with women at their absolute centre — the songwriting, the aesthetic, the emotional register they operate in is inseparable from that identity — and building the night around two instrumental acts, when there are local bands in this city with women in them who live inside doomgaze, heavy psych, or dark shoegaze, feels like a missed opportunity at the level of curation. Not a failing of the openers, who were both solid. Just a question worth asking about how you construct the full conversation of a night.

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The tour is called Not Here Not Gone, and the set they played felt like a band who've spent time figuring out what that means in a live context.

They opened with the mesmerising How Will You Feel, and the Corner's sound immediately established what the brilliant engineer had decided: drums and bass high in the mix, grounded and physical before the shimmer started layering over them. It was the correct call. Doomgaze lives in the upper register — the guitar swells, the vocal reverb, the sustained notes that blur into each other — and it can become weightless if the bottom end doesn't anchor it. Here it was anchored hard. You felt the room before you felt the atmosphere, and that order of operations made everything that came after hit harder.

Mourning After into Fade built early momentum carefully, neither song rushing to its peak, both understanding that this music is about the accumulation of feeling rather than the delivery of it. Involuntary Haze was where the set really started to find its weight — Sunny Faris's sublime voice doing the thing it does, which is anchor rather than float. 

Most vocalists in this genre let the mix carry them. Faris pushes back against the music, or leans into it on her own terms, and the result is that the songs have shape even when the instrumentation is dissolving into itself. Torn Reckless and Heavy, Why? continued the arc, each one tightening what the previous song had loosened.

Then, mid-set, Sunny and Mikayla swapped instruments. Guitar to bass, bass to guitar, executed without ceremony and without announcement — just two musicians who know how the other one thinks, picking up the other's instrument and continuing. It could have been a gimmick and it wasn't even close to one. The second half of the set ran differently because of it. Giraffe into Poppyfields felt more inside the music, looser in the right ways, the band playing with an intense coordination that came from something deeper than rehearsal. Void to Be was the centrepiece of the back half — distortion used as a deliberate choice rather than a wall to hide behind, every swell earning its landing. Fate Is Forward and Wandering Lost brought the temperature back down slowly, Bodies raised it again, and Spades closed it with the kind of onerous finality that doesn't feel like an ending so much as a room slowly returning to itself.

The whole performance was flawless in the way that the best live sets are flawless — not sterile, not overworked, but precise where precision matters and loose where looseness serves the song. A band completely in tune with each other and with what the music needs from them on a given night.

The room should have been full. It wasn't. Go see them next time.

This was my great chat with the band, well worth your time:

https://youtu.be/7uAeIPYr6tU

SUPPORT THE BAND BY BUYING MERCH AND MUSIC AND GOING TO THEIR EPIC SHOWS:

https://linktr.ee/Blackwaterholylight

AWESOME PICS AS ALWAYS BY https://www.instagram.com/dannomc/