Seekae - +Dome

Thu 14th Apr, 2011 in Music Reviews

Go, the first track on Seekae’s second album, opens with a manic guitar loop and it’s immediately evident that this is no The Sound Of Trees Falling On People, which opened with the relatively calm, flowing Yurai. This guitar trend continues in parts of the album, to the point where closing track You’ll could pass from an acoustic folk song. Elsewhere, the multi-faceted electronic sound found in their first album deconstructs into smaller genre, sound and emotion specific pieces. They assemble again as each now-matured element somehow makes its way into +Dome, providing a clear statement of intent: this is the fully realised ‘Seekae sound’.

The distorted guitar riff of Go is something you’d expect to find in Mogwai’s heavier moments: Glasgow Mega-Snake comes to mind, though Go shows restraint by threatening to explode but ultimately imploding on itself. Threatening to build as a hurried bassline joins, the guitar loop continues untroubled by the noises developing around it- all before cutting to an unexpected silence in perhaps another trick learned off the Scottish instrumentalists.

But Seekae haven’t simply taken tasters from their contemporaries. +Dome is a product of it’s time, certainly; but it’s also a product removed from it’s time, endlessly modern and enduring. As the trio step into more familiar territory, each song puts a slight variation on the previous. At its height, 3 is about as glitchy as any track on the generally smoother +Dome, which is sure to shock some fans of the glitch-heavy production of their earlier pieces. Next, Blood Bank manages to toy with a single vocal sample for almost four minutes.

This simplicity carries many tracks, particularly Reset Head. In what is likely their most understated track to date, static fuzz builds and falls around single drum stick clicks. When the fuzz recedes, there’s a beautiful clarity like none of Seekae’s other recordings yet. The grandiose strings in Underlying begin organically before being filtered through the band’s computers and leading into the album’s longest track, Gnor. During the two tracks, Seekae’s restraint from a sonic explosion (like those that characterise many songs on Trees ) builds a tension that’s simultaneously pleasing and frustrating.

Yodal finally releases all that tension, showing Seekae at the other end of the restraint-spectrum. Here, the band are at their heavy-beat loving best with a deeper beat, a mammoth bass interference and glitchy overlay bring to mind heavier parts of the band’s debut album.

What Trees achieved in over an hour, +Dome condenses into a solid, gratifying forty-minute listen. Far from losing any sense of adventure, Seekae have merely matured enough to be able to achieve just as much (if not more) in a shorter period of time showing off a band with the ability and means to present their ideas in an album deserving of all the accolades it will receive.