Seekonk
Pinkwood
North East Indie Records
Click to hear: “Take My Wife”
Imagine that you could crawl into a blanket fort with enough room to stand up and take a couple of paces. Now imagine that the fort was actually an enormous blanket house with meandering hallways and ornate blanket buttresses. Picture spending an afternoon wandering through the blanket house and discovering a small ocean in the basement.
That’s kind of what Pinkwood, the second release from local heroes Seekonk, feels like to me.
One of the nicest things about Pinkwood is its versatility. Any amount of attention you want to devote to listening is rewarded. As background music, it is atmospheric and lovely, but the album works equally well in a semi-social, “hey, you should really hear these guys” context, and it really shines when given a close listen on headphones or through a decent set of speakers.
The album’s opening track, “Love,” is a lush, understated example of what Seekonk does best on this disc. An amazing number of instruments and sounds are balanced together into a delicate and seemingly simple whole. Tuned percussion drifts through, and the entire track is layered with what sounds like reversed guitar or keyboard tones, but no one piece clamors for attention. The various elements are all doing their part to increase the sonic depth of the song, but the individual flourishes are only apparent when you really focus on them. In this way, the production on Pinkwood is evocative of Beck’s 2002 release, Sea Change.
The other comparison that readily comes to mind is the Minnesota “slowcore” trio Low. Seekonk resides in similar whispery, melodic territory, but one of the main things that separates Pinkwood from much of Low’s material – and from the previous Seekonk album, For Barbara Lee, for that matter – is vocalist Sarah Ramey’s willingness to really open up and sing. Shana Barry, who provided lead vocals on For Barbara Lee, did a gorgeous job, but it was hard to tell if she was practicing vocal restraint, or if her voice just naturally lived in a hush. Ramey, who joined the band after Barry left a couple of years back, clearly has a wide, dynamic range. She keeps it under wraps for most of the album, so it comes as a surprise when in the choruses of “Orange & Blue” her voice becomes expansive and powerful.
Pinkwood is generally a soft-spoken piece of work, so the moments when the levels creep up are especially exciting. For instance, on “Mar,” when drummer Jason Ingalls begins to apply some force to the drums and Pat Corrigan and Todd Hutchisen allow some distortion into their guitar tones, the cumulative effect is energizing. One guitar makes a drawn-out wash of sound that wraps around the strong rhythm carried by the drums and the second guitar, as Ramey and another vocalist (hard to tell who) drift along the top of the mix.
As “Mar” fades out, this wash of guitar tone is seamlessly folded into the beginning of the next track, “Take My Wife,” which broods along until a White Album-like crescendo announces one of the album’s strongest vocal hooks. I could be miles off base here, but “Take My Wife” feels like a track that really found itself in the recording process. More so than in the other songs onPinkwood, a wide variety of stray instruments are stirred in one at a time, and the track builds an incredibly rich sound that would be difficult to reproduce live. The result is tremendous – and all the more so when a full choir of voices comes in toward the end of the track.
The deft handling and clean presentation of all these instruments and voices is no doubt due in large part to Jonathan Wyman’s formidable skill as both an engineer and a producer. It’s also worth noting that Gateway Studios’ Adam Ayan mastered this disc. Like everything that comes out of Gateway (be it a record by Satellite Lot or Elvis Costello) this album sounds great. Every last detail is settled into its own specific spot in the mix, and sounds never have to compete with each other.
Pinkwood has everything: good songwriting, great production, terrific sonic variety and lovely packaging (by Bollard contributor Corrigan). It’s a shame there isn’t some kind of trophy that would be appropriate to award, because Seekonk really should get some sort of ornamental recognition for their efforts on this disc. Who’s good at making medals?
— Galen Richmond
Pinkwood hit stores on April 11. Seekonk play a CD release party on Sat., April 29, at Space Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland, at 8:30 p.m. Tix: $5 (18+). 828-5600. seekonkmusic.com.
