Doomgazing Under The Post-Hardcore Umbrella

Nightosphere / Porcelain / Facet / Sun Vow
Whittier Bar
Tulsa
July 3, 2024

If you’ve been reading our reviews from Tulsa for a minute, you’ll know Whittier Bar is as much an institution in our coverage as its shows are in Tulsa’s music scene. They are in the league of venues regularly turning out multi-genre excellence, so: another week, another great Whittier gig.

Last Wednesday featured a menagerie of local and touring acts that fit, not so neatly, under the post-hardcore umbrella.

Tulsa’s Sun Vow opened the show, and though they’ve described themselves as “doom gaze” on and off their socials, they initially showered the audience with full-ahead, exuberant rhythms atop frollicking tempos. The palette they painted with was cool pastels and shifting tones of the sky above you. A childlike sort of dreaminess was invoked, with shades of minor key darkness foreshadowing the storm clouds of adulthood we never saw coming in our youth.

As their set went on, the tempo gradually dropped, making good on the promise of doom in addition to their ethereal gaze, ending in a glorious dirge.

Oakland’s Facet occupied the sophomore slot, making this their second Tulsa appearance in 2024. Noise rock’s patron saint Steve Albini passed away this last May, but his presence could be felt in the room as Facet started, stopped, and start/stopped their way through jarring, euclidean rhythmic stabs.

The Whittier crowd was growing in size and ferocity at this point, with attendees swaying to Facet’s scything guitars.

Still twisty-turny, Austin’s Porcelain followed. Reinstating the breeziness of Sun Vow, Porcelain’s landscape was more cumulonimbus in nature. Their stormwall sound was punctuated with bursts of major key sunshine that would quickly shroud itself in their turbulent cadence.

Not only was the ghost of Albini present now, but the blazing gospel of Dischord records, too.

Bolstered by a recent tour with Oklahoma City trailblazers, Chat Pile, Nightosphere’s headline slot was deeply anticipated. They opened with an acoustic arrangement of System Of A Down’s “Toxicity,” straight into a noise rock burst that brought down the ethereal rains that had been cloud-seeded throughout the evening.

They utilized guitar harmonics in a punctuating way that evoked, and elicited, anxiety. There was a frailness to their chords, a lilting kind of brutality that evoked the crushing weightlessness of sorrow.

And with the evening’s bands sheltered beneath that post-hardcore umbrella, the true connection between all of them was their ability to summon a downpour of emotion through wood, metal and electricity. Making space for these connective moments of sonic maelstrom is the gift that, along with many other Tulsa venues, Whittier keeps on giving.