1993, the best of years the worst of years. In a way. Grunge having happened, gangsta-rap there but not really being what it could be due to unavoidable idiocy, apparently, and Britpop not anything (so what else is new, but I digress). That's why a lot of weird little things slipped in between the cracks, and that's where this particular album comes in.
Quique is pronounced 'keek,' for a start, and if it means anything I don't want to know. If you believed the press, you heard 'the Orb plays MBV,' except of course that was a big fat lie. When it wasn't, that is, because there was something of the same sense of space, loop and monstrous feedback scrape everywhere, like on "Polyfusion," for instance, as the dub-like echoes played out amongst an eternally returning scream. But the thing is that Seefeel rapidly became their own particular thing, and have since then deeply enjoy fragmenting, reassembling and recombining; the band is long since gone but I have this sneaking sense they all get together on weekends for parties.
Mark Clifford ended up getting the lion's share of the attention if only because he was the one behind the guitar noise and the arranging, but it was only him nobody would care as much. They would still care, mind you, because he's a great guitarist, aiming towards minimalism via zoneout, a good modern psych approach then and now. But this ignores Daren Seymour's equally minimal and effective bass playing (I'm still positive that's a rip from "White Lines" on "Industrious," and very well done at that), Justin Fletcher's careful, just-so way around the drums and the programming, finding heft in simple crispness and never exploding because, after all, it wasn't necessary, and Sarah Peacock's vocals, which maybe never said as much as some (and didn't, really), but avoided simply being the Cocteaus reborn or another Bilinda wannabe, say -- drifting in a perfect not-there kind of state, and mostly not being there at all.
So what makes them good, then? Blissout meets beat is perhaps overdetermined, but there's something there, to the point where when the late nineties happened and I ran across certain reviewers saying Bowery Electric were the first band to do something like that, I wanted to kill them. Nothing against Bowery, but frankly Seefeel had the better idea, namely to make everything incredibly, astoundingly clean. It flows smooth as can be without the slightest bit of grease, if you will, very much a CD album rather than a vinyl one. "Imperial" would in other hands perhaps try to aim for its title via bombast or explosion, whereas here it is all repetitive rise, an all-hail delivered by means of structure and chime, with the slightest but therefore most effective of changes as it goes, and all without any form of direct percussion on it either.
"Plainsong," their noted second single delivered here in slightly altered form, really says it all, a guitar loop shimmering in, another looping line providing a soft countermelody, an almost clinical, almost subliminal rhythm section and Peacock barely voicing "I'm laughing…I'm laughing…I'm melting…I'm melting…" and other such lines over and over again. Plain and as big as all outdoors.