Seefeel – Seefeel

After 14 years of silence, Seefeel, after swapping out two members, makes its comeback with a new, eponymous album. And while this new configuration still shares many of the classic sounds, right from the granular intro of "O-on One," the changes are clear. The live drumming on "Dead Guitars" gives way to harsher, disjointed guitar tones that finally resolve into something like a melody, while "Faults" offers a quiet clicking in order to reintroduce Sarah Peacock's bucolic vocals. "Rip-run," however, returns to the growl, and "Making" brings in a sense of chaos. "Airless" sweeps in, and "Aug30" follows ambiently in its footsteps, before "Sway" clonks in with its thudding snare and more Peacock's looped vocals to sweeten the pot. A welcome return.

This sounds like a harder more serious version of Glifted - Under And In (and if there was a band I could resurrect, they would be near the top of the charts). It's really guitar, bass, drums, and vocals; and taken in that context, I'd fly to the moon to see it played live. I like that they changed their sound and that this one is another all of it's own.

15 years on from their previous album, (Ch-Vox), and Seefeel make a surprising return; not just with an album of shoetronica rehashes hearkening 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 an aesthetic that Succour was hinting at; (Ch-Vox) being more of a dark-ambient sideline. 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 ultimately not as sinister as Succour, utilizes this idea in a very effective way. The style in which Seefeel have evaded various genre archetypes such as droning guitar chords and replaced them with scintillating bursts of static is a daring and impressive feat; it's akin to 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 its musical periphery is a very rare and precious thing. Seefeel's new eponymous LP does just that and I cannot recommend it highly enough!