Pure, Impure cover

Pure, Impure

Released

Seefeel were never shoegazers – let’s make that clear. There are some loose relationships, primarily to do with textural information and ‘new’ approaches to the guitar, but unlike the shoegaze crowd, who gestured towards pop sensibilities, the song was never Seefeel’s forte. Rather, they created a series of occluded spaces that initially appear static and empty, but reveal both intricacy and intimacy as you dive deeper. Pure, Impure compiled their “Plainsong” and “Time To Find Me (Remix)” 12”s onto one CD; the 2025 expanded edition includes their first EP, More Like Space, and an extra demo. The original edition is better as it’s more focused, tighter, and it loses the more normative threads of song form of More Like Space. “Plainsong” stretches a hallucinatory moment outwards to fill an entire room-size canvas; “Moodswing” dazzles with a heat-haze blurriness; “Minky Starshine” sounds like the quartet have unravelled their shivery guitars, dub-wise bass and pulse-breath rhythms, and laid them out in a long, unbroken line. The Aphex Twin remixes of “Time To Find Me” are two of his best, as they retain enough of the original to give Sarah Peacock’s voice a madeleine-like effect; Sine Bubble’s dub of “Plainsong” submerges everything in liquid mercury. Maybe it was post-rock, but really, this first batch of Seefeel releases felt like they drifted to shore from a relative nowhere.

Jon Dale

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