Seekae
(+)DOME
Release Date: Nov 1, 2011
Genre(s): Electronic, Pop/Rock, Club/Dance
Record label: Rice Is Nice
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Album Review: (+)DOME by Seekae
Great, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 4.0/5
Seekae's sophomore LP +Dome, has been crafted in the wake of post-hip-hop Brainfeeder raves in the US West Coast and the post-dubstep diaspora worldwide. It had to be. This Sydney group has likely had little personal contact with the stuff firsthand. But that's where +Dome's strength lies. Equal ….
Based on rating 3.5/5
Self-styled ‘ghetto ambient’ three-piece [a]Seekae[/a] like to work in contrasts. If opening track ‘Go’ sounds like a clockwork toy winding up, then the rest of ‘+Dome’ spews out a semi-regulated torrent of live loops and samples. At times, as on ‘Blood Bank’ or ‘Two’’s glitch-tipped shimmy-and-shuffle, the album’s overall trajectory feels directed by human hands.
Based on rating 7/10
If we’re being fussy, I suppose it’s slightly daft gathering any and all instrumental fare with a propulsive beat, blip and shuffle to it under the umbrella of ‘dance music’ - that implies its ultimate purpose is invariably to get feet moving - but what’s much, much bleaker is the weirdly widely-accepted ‘IDM’. That’s ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, if you’d not figured, obviously being a defective person who (obviously while skiving off important maths lessons) listens to ‘PDM’, aka ‘Prole Dance Music’, and is obviously therefore a philistine. So while ‘dance music’ is often something of a misnomer, it’s also true that one will evidently be less of a bell-end for sticking strictly to it, while slapping back one’s beard-stroke hand when reaching for a vaguely passive-aggressive indicator of one’s notionally superior taste.
Opinion: Excellent
It would be easy to wave a dismissive hand at the new album from Australian trio Seekae and, as others have done, tag it simply as 'Gold Panda or Boards of Canada fused with Hot Chip', but +Dome is a record that deserves to be considered very much on its own merits. This a smart album that plays a canny game of brinkmanship. Instead of veering off on some indulgent, chin-stroking tangent (which it only ever hints at doing – but only in a mocking, self-referential way, you understand), its woozy, fecund detail and hip-hop-referencing rhythms, skittering merrily over bass-heavy sounds and basal swathes of electronica, waste little time in getting under your skin.