Artist: Seasurfer
Title: Dive In
Genre: Dream Pop / Shoegaze
Release Date: 17th June 2014
Label: SaintMarieRecords
Album Review
How does it feel to fall free through a void of expanded time and liquid space? How does it feel to play with gravity and weightlessness, to make them entwine each other, forming towers and tunnels, skies and oceans, swallowing and bearing? How does it feel to listen to the tracks of SEASURFER’s ‘Dive In’? So many questions hard to answer, but I'm quite sure, that the results may sound similar. I hardly remember an album, whose title is more suited and more essential than that of the Hamburg/ Berlin/ Bayreuth based trio's debut, whose soundscapes and acoustic collages you can name Dream Pop, Shoegaze or Post Rock if you want, but it doesn't matter, cause it would feel like describing the shape of water. It's too versatile, too organic for catching it's outlines constantly.
If we keep the watery imagery (because somehow it seems to frame the songs, musically and substantially) you can say that the album is like a vast sea, quiet and shimmering now, wild and raging then, filled with colours dissolved from a variety of moods and emotive associations. Autumn sun-yellow and summer rain-green, light reflecting-blue and sunset over fields-orange, dreamily desaturated and blurred like watching old photographs on the ground of the ocean... triggering your memories. It's melancholic and it's calming and feels so fragile in its beauty nevertheless. The silver-soaked coastlines of ‘Stay’, the honey-gold light rays of ‘We run’, the kite-like circling of the ‘Dragon Song’, the aerial euphoria of ‘Cloudjumping’, the title track's vitreous spangled sky and ‘Fireworks’ fading lights... it is arcane but detailed, veiled but protecting, like a landscape strange to you but home once, perpetually re-creating but shelter at the same time.
A déjà vu painted with shimmering walls of guitars, ethereal constructs giving a damn about static, floating bass lines, humming and moving like an insect attracted by the last light of the day, driving drums, energetic but decent, sacrificing but rhapsodically and of course the voice of Dorian, which seems to bath in the light the music is bearing, stroked by the crystals of the sound, gliding through harmonies and melodies. There's this kind of roughness on its surface, a velvet patina, that keeps it midway between ground and sky, like a bridge the tunes can cross, turning the scale between gravity and weightlessness.
Okay, I confess it sounds familiar sometimes, uses a language that's not an unknown one, but in way like remembering home, comfortable and calming. There are shades of COCTEAU TWINS and SLOWDIVE, flashes of LAMPSHADE and LUSH but it feels good, feels enjoyable close... and to be honest; who wants innovation in his daydream memories? So I think it's not necessary to resume all these words above, because they should be clear and obvious – ‘Dive In’ is an album that runs through your veins like a river of light, dives you down in waters of sweet melancholia and washing around joy. A ten track daydream that makes you want to keep eyes closed, makes you want to stay underwater...as long as an endless breath takes.
Tracklist
01. Stay
02. We Run
03. Hide
04. Dragon Song
05. Cloudjumping
06. Under Water
07. Dive In (Nacht Nukleus)
08. Winterblume
09. The Big Panthers War
10. Fireworks
Line-up
Dorian E. – Vocals
Dirk – Guitars
Mikel Seasurfer – Bass
Website
https://www.facebook.com/seasurfer
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 8
Sound: 8
Total: 8 / 10
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