Sea Power @ The Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth

My route into Sea Power is an unusual one. It was Disco Elysium that did it, a game that already brims with incredible writing, art and dialogue, but one that wouldn’t be the same without Sea Power’s instrumental soundscapes running beneath it. There’s something about the way their music builds atmosphere that feels less like a soundtrack and more like weather. Every time I hear it, I’m back in that game.

The connection deepened when I watched From The Sea And To The Land Beyond, their score for the archival coastal documentary. Living in Southsea, those grainy visions of a bygone seaside felt personal, familiar stretches of shoreline rendered strange and nostalgic at the same time, with Sea Power holding the whole thing together.

So walking into the Wedgewood Rooms on Friday the 13th felt like more than just a gig. There’s a particular pleasure in seeing a band you came to through headphones and screens finally fill a room with sound.

On stage, Sea Power are a spectacle as much as a band. The stage is dressed like a corner of some overgrown greenhouse, plants and foliage creeping around the equipment, giving the whole thing an oddly organic feel that suits their sound perfectly. The instrumentation is just as varied; this isn’t a band content to stick to the standard guitar-bass-drums setup. At one point one of the members played guitar held like a violin, drawing the bow across the strings to produce something altogether more eerie and textured. It’s the kind of moment that reminds you why seeing them live is a different proposition to just putting a record on.

For those of us who came to Sea Power through Disco Elysium, there’s a particular kind of revelation that happens before you even reach the gig. Fans of the game who followed the music back to the source quickly discover that those atmospheric soundscapes have lyrics beneath them. Whirling-In-Rags, for instance, is a reworked version of an older track called Up Against It, stripped back for Revachol and quietly reassembled into something with words and weight. Hearing it in a room full of people rather than through headphones at 2am staring at a crumbling city is a different experience entirely. It’s the same music, but it feels like meeting a character outside the context you first knew them in.

When Two Fingers hit, the room became one. Arms up, V signs in the air, the whole crowd delivering the chorus back at the band like a toast to nobody and everybody at once. It’s that rare kind of song that manages to be simultaneously defiant and celebratory, and live it lands even harder than on record.

A bonus win of the night came at the merch booth. Tucked alongside the usual t-shirts and totes was a vinyl copy of the Disco Elysium soundtrack, a record that’s notoriously hard to get hold of and eye-wateringly expensive if you track one down online, especially factoring in shipping from the States. This one was being sold at a discount, marked as damaged. I turned it over, inspected every inch. Sealed. Whatever damage they were referring to, I couldn’t find it. I wasn’t about to argue.

Sea Power are one of those bands who’ve always played live shows like they mean it, and this was no different. Whether it’s the sweeping post-rock builds, the Disco Elysium material given new life with a room behind it, or Two Fingers reducing the crowd to a single organism, there’s a commitment to the performance that never wavers. You never leave one of their shows feeling like they were going through the motions.

For a venue as good as the Wedgewood Rooms, and a band as suited to Portsmouth as Sea Power, this was exactly what it needed to be.