Retroversy

The sea is a mighty force of nature, an ancient and unfathomable cosmic horror that will remain long after we’ve buried ourselves along with the lands we call home. How could something so powerful ever lose? The title of the debut single by the band STAKE (known back then as Steak Number Eight) posits this unimaginable scenario. What if the life of that which gives life to everything else, came to an end? What does it sound like when the cradle to which you owe your existence on this planet, leaves, for good? When life itself withers and wails and surrenders, bested by a blight so callous it will snuff out even the very fundamentals of all that is? What does it sound like when the sea is dying?

It sounds like sinister rumblings in the distance. It sounds like a trudging funeral march, every sullen footstep like an ageing behemoth’s, cumbered with the immeasurable weight of the casket it tows. It sounds like ebb and flow, like being torn between drifting away on atmospheric waves of inner harmony and acceptance and howling the air from your lungs at the injustice, degenerating into an unfiltered id of nothing but grief, grasping at the grim reaper’s cloak and begging him to delay the inevitable. It sounds like a primal scream.

Brent Vanneste knows what it sounds like. Losing your brother when you’re only a child is a thing that should not be. It’s the kind of atrocity that makes you step into a recording booth years later and unleash the kind of heart-rending dirge no teenage boy should ever have to compose. The four members of STAKE were on average fifteen years old when they played this song at Belgium’s most prestigious music competition in 2008. It sounds too preposterous, too perverse to even imagine. “The Sea is Dying” comes across exactly as unspeakable as the grief that inspired it must have felt like. It sounds like nothing short of the brutal evisceration of a childhood set to music.

Vanneste has never been a poet. His talents lie in mantric repetition, in beating the eldritch emotions at the core of STAKE’s music into a pulp with vocal hammers of various sizes and shapes. In fact, most of STAKE’s lyrics can be tattooed in their entirety on the palm of your hand, and indeed, most of “The Sea is Dying” consists of different shades of “you don”t know”, “you don’t care” or “you don’t understand”. Yet what could easily be passed off as teenage angst by the less empathetic, here sounds exactly like what it is. It sounds like a cry for help.

Steak Number Eight — itself a reference to a song Vanneste’s brother wrote — eventually changed their name to STAKE in 2018, signalling the end of a long period of mourning. From the ashes of this grief rose music that is more experimental, ambiguous and unhinged, reflecting the increased complexity of adulthood. Nevertheless, “The Sea is Dying” remains a staple of STAKE’s live performances even if the intense feelings it reflects have been given their proper place. It’s a testament to the song’s lasting power as a reflection of the overwhelming, crushing weight of grief — a feeling we assume to be indomitable, eternal and unknowing, until it too succumbs to the embrace of death.