Drink The Sea
Dabadaba, San Sebastian, Spain
5th December 2025
Boasting various ex-members of REM, Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, Mad Season and the Mark Lanegan Band, the provenance of Drink The Sea tends to freight it unfairly with a suggestion of ‘super-group’. Martin Malone finds out why this would be a lazy tag.
In this cool wee club beside the railroad track, what I encounter is a troupe of great musicians simply having a blast while playing material from one of my favourite releases of the year: a genuine slow-burn classic that insinuates itself into your consciousness with its cool hybrid of styles: from rock, Latin-groove and gamelan to north-Afrobeat with wonky time signatures.
Assembled before back-projections of travel through industrial and desert landscapes, Drink The Sea hit their stride early with the album’s cracking opening sequence of Shaking The Snakes, Saturn Calling and Outside Again. Alain Johannes and Duke Garwood’s lead baritones conjure up a rich vocal world reminiscent of both Mark Lanegan and – to these ears – the Matts Berninger and Johnson in their prime.
What strikes one initially is the unusual arsenal of instruments in play, ranging from an electric oud, cigar-box guitar and electric sitar to Garwood’s soprano sax and clarinet, with which he drops a hint of klezmer into the mix.
On disc, however, their secret weapon is Lisette Garcia’s Latin and far-eastern percussive grooves, which add slinkiness to the overall feel and elevate House of Flowers in particular to my album highlight. It’s disappointing, then, that some of this is lost in the mix tonight, along with – from where I was stood – the groovy subtlety and punch of Abbey Blackwell’s bass. Here in the small rock club context song endings meander somewhat, too, where they make more sense on record.
However, the band grooves seductively throughout, propelled by Barrett Martin’s supple and versatile drumming. Despite the likely weight of eyeballs, Peter Buck is very much the ensemble player here, his tremelo-heavy trademark Rickenbacker adding spaghetti-western undertones to the sound or 12-string acoustic holding down an atmosphere. Of all his post-REM collaborations and side projects, Drink The Sea is one of the least predictable and all the more beguiling for that. For fans of the Athens legends – particularly those who love New Adventures in the Hi-Fi – familiar tones are encountered in Sip Of The Juice from Drink The Sea II, where the letter is well and truly E-Bowed. And there’s an almost obligatory run-out for The One I Love, which closes the set, along with the Desert Sessions’ Making a Cross and QOTSA’s Hangin’ Tree.
All else, however, is very much Drink The Sea doing their dark mambo and enjoying themselves, their sprawling two-and-a-half hour set making for a great evening while outside, another train rolls by the window and stormy seas take hold of the Bay of Biscay.
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Words by Martin Malone (guest post)
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