The focus for today's first feature is
Grass Stains & Novocaine, the first full length album by the Bay Area's
Seablite. Your ears will identify touchstones such as C86, shoegaze, Sarah Records, '80s Glasgow. We expect that any competent group of musicians can work with those ingredients, but it takes rarer skill and true inspiration to mesh them into a set of songs like these. Fuzz, feedback, chiming guitars, melody and hooks swirl through the arrangements with a concise urgency while the dual female vocals float and tease. Our favorites change each time we run through the album. Currently we are especially taken with "Pillbox" (the best Shop Assistants song that isn't a song by the Shop Assistants that we've heard in a long, long time), "Heart Mountain", the dreamy "(He's A) Vacuum Chamber", the jangling "House of Papercuts", and "I Talk To Frogs". But how could we omit "Haggard" and "Won't You" -- oh hell, really, every song is just so damn good.
Seablite are Lauren Matsuir (vocals/guitar), Andy Pastalaniec (drums), Galine Tumasyan (bass/vocals), and Jen Mundy (guitar). Grass Stains and Novocaine is out Friday, June 7, via Emotional Response Records.
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