The Sea Thieves

Led by the clawhammer guitar playing and whispered vocals of songwriter Zac Coligan, Adelaide collective The Sea Thieves are steeped in the quiet-folk tradition of Nick Drake and the lo-fi, swoon-inducing charm of Bill Callahan and M. Ward.

Formed years ago as a recording project by Coligan and wife Naomi Thompson, the pair made used some downtime from live performance to chart a new, weird and wonderful musical direction with an experimental EP under the appropriately warm and wooly name of ‘Eiderdown’. With its fondness for ukulele, looped drums and strange spoken word samples, ‘Summer of the Red Wolf’ laid the groundwork for what would eventually become The Sea Thieves. Boasting tracks like ‘The Eve of Acid Rain’ and ‘Shadow of My Hand’, it also honed their knack for evocative song titles.

On record The Sea Thieves’ music positively bristles with odd sounds. It creaks and crackles as if every instrument were an eccentric geriatric prising themselves from a rocking chair to tell the children another yarn.  Always ones for unconventional instruments, the band often opt for dusty toy pianos, wheezing accordion and most famously (relatively speaking) the singing saw to augment their sound.

Not content to popularise just the singing saw amongst the Adelaide scene, they’ve recently made use of a strange device known as an Optigan (portmanteau of Optical and Organ).  An electric keyboard produced by Mattel in 1970, the Optigan works by triggering samples of pre-recorded instruments through some kind of disc based mechanism that a simple History major like myself cannot hope to fathom. Needless to say, in both description and execution it sounds pretty cool.

Whereas their sparse 2007 full-length ‘Hiding In The Shade’ was defined by a sense of solitude, recorded and performed almost solely by Naomi and Zac, the new record ‘They Will Run’ bears a strong sense of community. With the assistance of Arts SA the pair reunited with many of their former bandmates who escaped to Melbourne at the turn of the century, including producer/guitarist Jed Palmer and cellist Zoe Barry. With these co-conspirators the rapidly expanding outfit added muted group harmonies and all sorts of strings, percussion and front parlour piano to what are undoubtedly some of the pair’s most effortlessly pristine songs yet.

Of course Coligan and Thomspon are also mainstays of the Adelaide scene through their propriety of the Jade Monkey, that lovely, dimly lit little venue off Rundle Mall with retro furniture, bright green walls and fairy lights to boot. It’s from the other side of the bar that Zac has been able to accrue much of the band’s current lineup, gradually drafting some of the more talented musicians to grace his stage to his own project over the years, including violinist/guitarist Tom Spall (Doe, Leader Cheetah) and drummer Aiden Moyse (Hawks of Alba, Curses, Bad Girls of the Bible). Although assembled after the recording of ‘They Will Run’, this new live configuration has given the band new legs, adding a robust under current (and rich harmonies) to the material that gives the Sea Thieves as degree of live grandeur that matches the charm of their recordings. Make it a priority, dear reader, to experience both.

Originally published in On Dit Magazine 79.6

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