Seeing themselves initially as outsiders totally at odds with all the usual corporate bullshit going on seems to have allowed this Surrey-based band room enough to unravel their attractive brand of thoughtful and idiosyncratic ‘collegiate rock’ free from all the cloying anxieties of industry pressure. As Dylan put it, ‘when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’. And these self-styled ‘casual pilots exploring twilight noise seduction’ (their words, not mine, thankfully) have certainly got nothing to lose even some five years after the initial industry buzz that saw them squeeze in support slots with the likes of Laptop, Grandaddy and Dawn of the Replicants (rumour has it that after just three gigs the band could have been signed to Fierce Panda but that label’s A&R department got pissed at the Kerrang! party and turned up too late to see them).
With comments like “we’re a very contradictory band“ you’d be forgiven for thinking that Seafood are a little too self-conscious, or a little too paranoid to be the kind of precious, gung-ho iconoclasts they purport to be, but after all the early promise of mini-album, ‘Messenger In The Camp’ it has to be said that new album ‘As The Cry Flows’ confirms every nervous ‘good’ suspicion we were harbouring about the band.
Still very much sounding like a cross between Pavement, Pixies, Weezer, Super Furry Animals and Sonic Youth, Seafood prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that are one of the very few masters of English lo-fi.
With rippling shafts of sunshine supplied by new guitarist, Kevin Penney’s jangling arpeggios ‘As The Cry Flows’ is an oddly folksy proposition. ‘I Dreamed We Ruled The Sun’ sung by the band’s Caroline Banks is as fragile, a velvety, and an undergroundy thing as could be imagined. Dilating acoustic rhythms, weightless nylon strings, atmospheric noises combine with a number of dense, relentless riffs to provide the kind of weirdo, rural Englishness favoured by Hackett-era Genesis and proggy cast-offs like Anthony Phillips. Delicate yet surreal, winsome, yet waspish. And when the noise does come, as it eventually does in the Weezer-resque ‘Heat Walks Against Me’ (play it back to back with ‘Say It Ain’t So’ off the Weezer blue album) it comes in with the kind of full-on, overblown guitar carnage that we’ve come to love as classic Seafood. And the same could be said of the broad, panning cinemascope that characterises current single, ‘Summer Falls’ which supplies the kind of stormy, crashing surf formerly tendered by Buffalo Tom’s ‘Summer Song’, only this track comes complete with a constant rumbling bass pattern that enters your head, slips on a pair of slippers and helps itself to a beer or two out of your fridge…and refuses, quite unapologetically to budge. As heroic a single as your likely to hear all year.
Whilst tracks like ‘Good Reason’ afford the album a modicum of nuts and bolts, honest-to-goodness QOTSA/Foo Fighter style rocking it’s the band’s cover of Paul Giovanni’s ‘Willow’s Song’ that steals the show. First heard during the famous Britt Eckland-butt-naked-thrashing-against-the-wall scene in the horror-yarn ‘The Wicker Man’ ‘Willow’s Song’ perfectly illustrates the ethereal, faintly sinister watercolour texture the band are patently trying to produce. And a very successful and striking a moment it is too.
What is a near death experience for David Line turns out to be a thorough life-affirming experience for the rest of us.