“Half of Happiness” is a clever choice of opener to Seek Warmth’s latest full-length release. As a song employing that classic on/off dynamic, a blend of the heavy and the ornate, the subtle and the intense, the surging and the sophisticated, it speaks to a band who take pleasure in making opposites attract, a band that sees sounds, styles and genres as merely sonic colors to be mixed into new hues with which to paint their stunning, sonically juxtaposed musical pictures.
But it’s not as simple as that. It never is. Nor should it be. While “Distortion” shows that they can, when they wish to, err on the side of accessibility, blending muscle and melody into memorable hooks and infectious tunes, they also love venturing into the fringes of the musical map.
The strangely (strange is good, right) named“You Make the Fog Rehearse” takes that melodicism and seems to rip it up and put it back together as an anagram of itself, so that at times it is effortlessly accessible, at others it feels more like two or three different songs welded together. Un-second-guess-ability is the name of the game.
“Let Me Claim My Prize” is chiming and slightly off-kilter in the most creative of ways. “I Am Empty” is both intense and euphoric, destructive and groove-savvy, and “Trick the Trend” sounds like ’80s college rock remade for a smarter, contemporary, post-genre world.
Somehow, in all the madness, they create subversive melody, amidst the angularity, you find accessibility, and in the musical maelstrom, often, raw sophistication, as they weave scuzzy alternative rock and intense post-punkery into almost pop-aware, and unexpectedly memorable tunes.
It’s the sound of the underground going overground!
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