Seefeel, Succor
Featured Album
A slow-moving, molten glacier of sound, and a stone-cold classic
If you ever wanted to feel like you were swimming inside a glacier, Seefeel's "Meol" would be a good place to start. The opening track from the group's 1995 album is all molten tone. Resonant, drawn-out notes — guitars, synthesizers, reverb, waves of nameless ache — soak up color as chords almost imperceptibly slide through their changes, following a wandering melodic line that never seems to repeat itself. "Utreat" conjures the same state, a slow churn of sustained electric bass and synthesizers; faint drum-machine handclaps, run through a decelerating delay, seem to tumble in mid-air. It's hard to think of another album that feels at once so grounded and so buoyant.
Released in 1995, two years after Polyfusia, Succor presents a significantly different band. The shoegaze elements are all but gone, blurred guitars replaced by slow, resonant drones; synthesizers gleam with a sickly artificiality. Bass is a bowed groan. The group's drum programming is at its most deliberate here, a careful balance of dub groove and industrial force; the metallic, corroded sounds seem to come from machines that have been left out in the rain. Sarah Peacock's singing, run through a battery of delays, emerges as though strained through cheesecloth, rendered into wordless drops of tone. Comparisons to the Cocteau Twins are apt, but the almost tribal undertone here makes Peacock's distant wail distinct. The album's only possible misstep is "Vex," a pummeling acid whirlwind that no doubt was awe-inspiring to behold live, but comes across as too gratingly insistent in the context of the album. Regardless, for fans of drones, ambient dub and downcast bliss-out music, Succor is a stone classic.
