Seefeel ‎– Seefeel

15 years on from their previous album, (Ch-Vox), and Seefeel make a surprising return; not just with an album of shoetronica rehashes harking back to their mid ninties heyday, but something wholly new and refreshing; in this listener's opinion their best album to date!

'Seefeel' sounds like the next logical step in the aesthetic that Succour was hinting at (Ch-Vox being more of a sideline; an aberration, but an awesome one). The thing I've always loved about Succour, especially compared to the Too Pure records, is how the ostensible beauty (which consisted predominately of Sarah's vocals) was always offset by a dark or foreboding undertone, stopping things from getting too sugarcoated or reverential... 'Seefeel', while not the black hole that Succour is (tracks like WFWF and Cut being the light swirling around the event horizon before being sucked into the darkness), uses this to profound effect. The way that Seefeel have evaded various genre archetypes such as droning guitar chords (nice as those are) and replaced them with bursts of retina-burning static is incredibly daring; it's like mining for the materials to make melodies from less obvious sources. It must have been much harder to do, but ultimately much more rewarding.

True originality is a waning commodity in music these days; finding something that sounds only rudimentarily like anything in it's musical periphery is a very rare and precious thing. Seefeel's new eponymous LP does just that and I cannot recommend it highly enough!