SEER - Vol 1 & 2
February 24, 2016, 8 years ago
(Art Of Propaganda)
Hard to get a grasp on Vancouver's Seer here, and that's a good thing, the band at first sounding almost stoner-rock-esque on this debut full-length (don't let the confusing title fool you), but that leads into a simple take on kinda-Mastodonian expansive sludge: the riffing on “Hive Mind” is huge, and great. There's only six tunes here, and track three, “Cosmic Ghost”, is an acoustic interlude which mainly just makes me restless, and ditto for meandering closer “Aeons” (not acoustic, but still makes me restless), but the other four hit hard enough, and also go on for long enough, to make this count: “Haunter” manages to be angular even though it crawls at a Crowbar pace, and it's the best cut on the album, getting better and better through every of its nine minutes, the song a real juggernaut of forward momentum.
There's a slightly nagging feeling throughout this album of a band not quite going for it; the screaming isn't convincing, the more melodic singing isn't quite either, and the production could stand to be a bit uglier to match up with the sludge vibe on the disc. But that's the catch: there's also a smoother near-stoner vibe that begs for a crisper sound, and even though the combo is a bit jarring at times, Seer do it all with ease and power on this captivating starter.
