For Barbara Lee by Seekonk (Review)

Last year, Kimchee Records sent me a copy of Torrez’ The Evening Drag, a darkly beautiful album that was one of my favorite albums of 2002. And now, a year later, they send me a copy of Seekonk’s For Barbara Lee, which would be perfect for the “B” side of a mixtape with Torrez’ album. While perhaps not quite as dark and foreboding as Torrez’s album, For Barbara Lee holds much of the same allure for me with its slowly building songs, constructed out of haunting atmospherics, lovely instrumentation, and the breathy vocals of Shana Berry.

The album opens with one of its loveliest tracks: “Move” stars off slowly, with pensive guitars, sparse drumming, and brushed keys barely maintaining the song’s shape and form. Meanwhile, Berry sings as if she’s caught in perpetual sigh. “Move” is a perfect example of Seekonk’s slowburning tendencies. As the song picks up the pace, the drums grow more consistent, the guitars more confident, and by song’s end, Berry’s voice finds itself cresting along on a rolling wave of chiming guitars as her words (“I was born in the sky above…”) slowly descend back down to the listener.

“Swim Again” continues in the same vein, though this time a lofty horn arrangement soars somewhere above the churning guitars and crashing drums, echoing the weightlessness of Berry’s voice. “Hate The Sun” takes the album on a more amorphous route, with groaning feedback and picked guitars creeping along to an ominous pulse. It’s the album’s darkest and most obtuse moment, and yet the ghostly vocals manage to have an oddly playful lilt to them.

This amorphous quality ebbs and flows over into “The Delivery,” a captivating, Califone-like track that meanders across 7 minutes. Echoing percussion, grainy drones, strings, quivering electronics, and fragile lullaby-like guitar melodies find themselves lost in a strange collage of field recordings. It’s not really accurate to call this a “song,” though at times the various elements do coalesce into something somewhat definable. But for the most part, it’s rather shapeless, and yet the sonic depths contained within are nonetheless beautiful and captivating.

After several tracks of rather languid pace, it’s nice to hear the band get a bit more uptempo, which they do on “You Got What Was Coming To You.” Its upbeat drumming and choppy acoustic guitars make it the album’s most energetic track, and yet the subtle cello and Berry’s gentle vocals give it an airy, expansive feel at the same time.

The album ends with a rumbling cloud of drones and feedback, out of which “Maps Of Egypt” slowly emerges. Berry’s voice joins them, singing “I am not a Rubik’s cube/My colors don’t align/I am solved fairly easily/Maybe I’m a red brick wall/I challenge you to climb/I bet you’d fall” (it’s fascinating to hear just how much emotional punch those lyrics have from Berry’s icy delivery, given their imagery). The song is a perfect capper to the album, with aching vocals and lovely instrumentation to spare, and ends like it begins, disappearing back into a roiling cloud of sound.

When I first heard For Barbara Lee, I had it playing in the background while I worked on other stuff. I thought it was fairly decent, but nothing terribly special. Certainly it didn’t bowl me over quite like The Evening Drag had when I first heard it. But much like the slowly building nature of its songs, I found my appreciation inexorably growing with each listen.

In fact, as I listened to it while driving down the interstate on a clear, cold November day, the empty fields and naked trees whipping by under a pale grey sky, I was amazed at just how much these songs had enveloped me. I could think of nothing better to listen to in that particular time, place, and state of mind.

These subtle, unassuming songs had completely won out.