Sea Wolf – White Water, White Bloom

Sea Wolf – White Water, White Bloom
7/10

The album is dead, right? That’s what everyone keeps saying, though I’m not convinced it’s true anywhere other than in the minds of those that say it. Maybe the era of 3 good songs + 7 filler tracks is over, and in that sense the ‘bad’ album is dead, but I’m sure none of us are mourning that. Though I’m not sure ‘bad’ albums are dead either, other than maybe people aren’t as eager to pay for them.

I think the ‘good’ album is still a perfectly viable art form, however. Take this effort from Sea Wolf, which I shamefully left untouched on my shelf for months for no better reason than I just forgot it was there. I really loved his last EP, so I have no idea why I all but ignored his full-length. Vocally, he tends to sound like a hybrid between Andy Yourke (Unbelievable Truth) and Connor Oberst. He flirts with Oberst’s wilder, less-controlled outbursts, but as soon as he gets too close to the edge he pulls back (more Monsters of Folk than Desapracidos, then).

But back to the point about albums…if you make a mixtape, you don’t just stick 12 random tunes into Nero and hit ‘burn disc’, do you? Well, not if you’re good at it. You listen to the songs as a whole, you decide what sounds good in what order. Sea Wolf clearly value this skill. There’s a natural ebb and flow to WWWB. It works as a cohesive whole without sounding like the same song repeated 10 times.

I actually ended up banning this record from my car, because every time I’ve listened to it while driving I became so engrossed I ended up going into a sort of autopilot, which is obviously a bad idea for myself as well as my fellow drivers. Apparently, it demands my full attention so a mere casual listening experience simply won’t do.

Is the band traveling down a well-worn path? Certainly. Rock tends to cannibalize its forebears more often than we’d like, but just because something has been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be toe-tappingly good. And this is.

Sea Wolf – O Maria!

Shannyn Sossamon, now there’s a vampire I miss…

Tags: sea wolf