Seefeel: "Dead Guitars"

If you read what I had to say about the latest Tim Hecker album, you’ll know that I appreciate a good ironic title, but the first leak from Seefeel’s return pretty much kills it. Guitars are dead, long live guitars. In the mid-‘90s when Seefeel, Bark Psychosis, and Pygmalion (1995)-era Slowdive initiated the most non-threatening rock revolution ever (or more realistically, finally started dealing with the implications of late Talk Talk), a statement like that must have felt liberating, but now it’s a little quaint. Every laptop-sporting guitarist mounting their axe on a table-top and sticking metal things in it as if literally deconstructing its history can attest to that.

And yet no other shift in electronic music since has peaked my excitement in the same way: something about still operating on the fringes of rock music rather than having nothing to say about it at all. Post-anything has always been a bit too eschatological for my tastes, but post-rock not only threatened to use the tools of rock against itself, but actually broke the cycle whereby each musical revolution had to drown out the one that preceded it, as if Lenin had the workers of the world stay home and take up crochet.

I’ve heard Seefeel’s return being compared to Portishead’s, which I can somewhat appreciate: same era, same casual dismissal of movements they were unwillingly placed in the center of, same industrial grind, like their earlier records had been dragged behind Christian Marclay’s pickup truck for the last decade-and-a-half. Hopefully in the opium-paced staggered drumbeat and strangled static of “Dead Guitars” critics will stop calling this band “dream pop”—it being not particularly dreamy nor poppy. Like their best work, it sounds fucking massive on headphones even as it creates humble little mosaics out of the shards of the past.