Last fall, Seefeel showed up out of the blue to perform new material at Warp’s 20th Anniversary concert. An EP titled Faults was released shortly thereafter.
This came as something of a surprise, as I hadn’t heard anything from them since 1996. It’s hard to grasp that it’s been 17 years since I first heard them on the astounding Pure, Impure EP.
Lots of things from that period sound pretty dated. Surprisingly, Seefeel’s output doesn’t.
Maybe that’s because they were never really part of the whole “techno” axis in the first place. After all, they were a guitar band, closer in approach to shoegazers like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine than to gearheads like Beaumont Hannant and Richard Kirk.
Nonetheless, Warp signed them on in 1996. Perhaps chafing under the idea of being a pet guitar band on a label of electronic acts, Clifford largely pared down the instrumentation, taking the band in a more sparse and claustrophobic direction. The Technicolor blush of Quique was abandoned in favor of something channeling Robert Hampson in his darker moments. Succour, the resulting album, was ultimately something of a disappointment.
They recorded one last record on Rephlex in 1996, then split up while leader Mark Clifford went on to work on a side project called Disjecta. That seemed to be it.
Now they’re back. The two big questions are: have they changed, and are they still relevant?
The answer to both is a qualified “yes.”
Mark Clifford and vocalist Sarah Peacock are the only remaining members, and the rhythm section has been replaced with Shigeru Ishihara on bass and former Boredom Iida Kazuhisa on drums. Having a flesh-and-blood rhythm section brings a certain sense of ebb and flow back into the proceedings, something that was sorely missing on Seefeel’s last two records.
The difference between then and now is hard to quantify, but this still feels like them. They may be looser, darker, and a bit untidy around the edges, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
There are elements of trip-hop in the rhythms, and the smatterings of glitch are quite apparent. Lest I think they’re co-opting recent developments, it occurs to me that they were already using both approaches in their 1990’s material.
Despite the noise in the periphery, first single “Dead Guitars” could easily pass for something from their earlier work. Are those the fingerprints of :zoviet*france’s Decriminalization of Country Music on “Step Up,” or is it just that the bands have at times traced similar arcs?
“Rip Run” wouldn’t have been out of place on the criminally-overlooked Starethrough, and even if “Making” appears to channel Portishead in timbre, Clifford’s approach is unmistakable.
So, yes, they’ve changed, but not drastically. I wouldn’t expect a revolution from a band that revels in stasis.
And are they still relevant? That’s an easy one for someone who was never trendy in the first place. Other material from Warp’s class of 1993 sounds like product of its time, but the vast sweep of older tracks like “Imperial” wouldn’t sound the least bit dated if released today.
They’ve proven here that they can come back from a 15-year absence as if nothing happened. I look forward to hearing more from them.