Maybe it's some sort of obscure sexual reference, I don't know; but probably 'Seafood' is just as random as 'Pavement' or 'Blur'; just a word chosen without any particular reason attached to it.

Seafood are another of those bands which I got into because they sounded like Sonic Youth; it might be a pretty vacuous way of finding music, but it's better than just buying whatever the NME tells you. Anyway, as happened with other bands, I soon found out there was more to Seafood than just a very similar record collection to mine. Seafood in fact turned out to be much more ambitious than that.

Essentially they have their musical finger in all guitar music's pies- noise rock, metal, folk, and so on. And yet at the same time they manage not to sound either schizophrenic or particularly like Pavement. Which is an achievement in itself.
 

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When Do We Start Fighting... (2001 , Infectious Records / Fierce Panda)
Seafood definitely win the prize for most consistently underrated band, that's for sure. Yeah, Terris and their like talk a lot but that doesn't really hide the fact that they aren't really any good at anything except making the NME like them. Seafood, on the other hand, are good at being good, but not so good at making the NME think they're good. Capish?

Recordered in Brooklyn, NYC, this album manages to sound quite a lot like the last Seafood release without actually seeming very similar to it at all. Opening track 'Cloaking' sounds like the kind of thing Seafood are known-for; slightly out-of-tune guitar noise-pop, but it has a different dimension to the tracks on 'Surviving the Quiet'. Somehow the structure of the songs has got better, and is far less noticably quiet-loud than before. Suffice to say it rocks.

'Western Battle' is similarly great, but somehow it doesn't sound quiet like a little indie band from England; it sounds like, you know, a real band, like Pavement or Sonic Youth. That is, it doesn't sound like them, it sounds on the same level as them. Perhaps it's just Seafood's increasing confidence, but it's clear on this record that Seafood have done more than just 'more of the same'.

Third track 'Pleasurehead', for example, sounds completely unexpected the first time you hear it, but listen again and everything fits together; 'What May Be The Oldest' manages to succeed are relative quiet without ever having to be loud, and vocally Seafood have cleverly used more backing vocals, filling out their sound. On 'People Are Underestimated' it works with great My Bloody Valentine intensity, only you can actually hear the words.

The semi-title track 'In This Light Will You Fight Me?' is my favourite. Not many bands can really come up with songs which have the true spine-tingling effect, but Seafood have succeeded. On tracks like 'Desert Stretched Before The Sun' and 'He Collects Dust' they've truly embraced the quiet; not such much surviving the quiet as embracing it.

Surviving the Quiet (2000, Fierce Panda)
The first track, 'Guntrip' hits you with a big thrash-noise riff, then gets louder. It's great. But second track 'Easy Path' lays down Seafood's real plan of action; vaguely folky melodies which suddenly go bang! in your face. The Sonic Youth comparisons are accurate, and make no mistake, the 'Food really do rip off the 'Youth, but they manage to do it in the same way Nirvana ripped off Sonic Youth, i.e. using this is as framework for their own ideas. They also rip off Sebadoh, and quite a lot of the vocals in the quiet bits really do sound exactly like Lou Barlow; they also have Pavement's slightly out-of-tune quirkiness, but the really odd thing is how utterly irrelevant this all is. The songs here as just so good that doesn't matter what their record collections look like.

There aren't any bad tracks, or even any mediocre ones. All the songs ooze the impression that here's a band who've spent a long time perfecting what they do, and now they're so good at it they can't fail. They manage to do both incredibly fragile folk ('Beware Design') which makes Belle and Sebastian look like Napalm Death, and screaming hardcore ('FSCII') that makes Napalm Death look like, well, Belle and Sebastian. And they also do the off-kilter pop thing throughout, notably on 'This is Not an Exit', which makes more sense on the album than it did on the radio.

Quiet. Loud. Quiet. Louder; Seafood have perfected this formula to, well, perfection.

#LINKS#
Seafood Official
just the usual discography, tour dates etc. but worth a look nevertheless
Fierce Panda
the site of the best-named record label in the multiverse

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