Label: Moonlee Records
Production: Dimitrij Petrović
Release date: 06.05.2019
Album length: 34.52 min
Genre: Alternative Rock
Rating: 8.5 / 10
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Seine is a duo of two former members of the Croatian alternative rock band Vlasta Popić, who joined forces in a new creative musical venture after the band broke up. They’re Ivan Ščapec and Dimitrij Petrović. Less than two years after their predecessor “Sno sna,” they’re back with the follow-up, called “22.” The debut served up plenty of oddities and quirks, which helped the new band make a name for itself in the Balkans and across Central Europe. Above all, though, what stuck in the memory was Ivan Ščapec’s peculiar singing. His vocal timbre sounds so unusually androgynous that it quickly fools the listener into thinking a woman is actually singing on the album. Then you realize that’s definitely not the case, and you’re left with at least a cheeky remark: here’s the guy with the best female vocal around (well, almost the best, if we count Geddy Lee (Rush), of course).
Joking aside. Ščapec’s vocal is once again an integral element on the new album and a truly essential building block of the style that guarantees all the distinctiveness of this, in many ways daring, alternative rock outfit. “22” serves up even more provocative play compared to its predecessor, which effectively widens the band’s artistic range and lifts it to a whole new level.
Sharp, greasy phrasing builds an avalanche of crunch out of the now-distorted guitar, or out of thickly pouted acoustic guitar tones, which melt skillfully into (or talk to) the added programmed sound loops and the freshly recorded samples leaning on the trip hop tradition. The duo holds on to the noisy stance of rudimentary, sturdy sonic maneuvers and bristling electrification, or even deepens it compared to the debut. It wraps around Ščapec’s vocal lines, which are often deliberately dissonant. Vocals that are “stoned,” “hollow,” even completely “numb” and “alienated,” or, to a degree, with the feel (which the album’s production itself coaxes out) of a voice that sounds like it’s coming from another galaxy.
The development of these otherwise compact songs, which follow the minimalist axiom of “less is more,” is often fixated on finding atonal solutions. That adds a appealing streak of weirdness to the album, and it’ll thrill anyone who goes looking for something (literally) unusual in the alternative rock underground. Still, the focal point of the songwriting is general accessibility and compactness, so even in experimental escapes, or when dissonant moves between crunch and vocal get combined, the songs always keep a traceable songwriting format.
Seine are neither technical virtuosos nor music-school-trained geniuses, so their approach is marginal and minimal, but they handle it with a skill that masters it down to the last detail. They keep honing their craft and refining it effectively. At times even to the point of bizarreness, which only teases the listener in the best way. Seine remain a band that follows radical evolutionary shifts, through an honest transfer of inner senses, emotions and passions into their own musical story. So it’ll be interesting to see what Seine serve up next in their career, and where their sonic visionary moves will take them. The album “22” boldly smashes the usual templates too. In a tense theater of dark vistas, the kind Ščapec’s inner world lays bare in a “brave new mad world,” it rattles and shocks the listener. In the feelings it creates, a hopeless shackle of anxiety that’s even a little scary, it just waves a raised white flag of surrender and waits, crushed, for the inevitable apocalypse to finally happen.
by: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Nebo (04:52)
2. Novče (03:00)
3. Pitaju (02:33)
4. Paresu (05:12)
5. Treba (03:59)
6. Borovnica (08:45)
7. El Zlo (07:04)
Lineup:
Dimitrij Petrović – drums, percussion, keyboards, vocals, harmonica
Ivan Ščapec – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, vocals, “hi-hat” cymbal on track 2
