Sickoakes
Seawards

Another album from Sweden.
Another debut band.
Another satellite orbiting a universe, that of the so-called “post rock,” which I am told is now doomed to a kind of exhausting self-referentiality.
But by delving into the instrumental realms of “Seawards,” one instead finds many clues of a defined identity, which seems to have found a reason for being and its own register to express it.

The six from Stockholm, in fact, have been on the scene since 1999. The fact that they are releasing their first album after all these years perhaps indicates the slow and gradual maturation of a project.
And of a sound.
In fact, it is precisely the peculiar identity of their sound, predominantly guitar-based, that permeates the excellent album.
It governs the typical expansion of the “genre,” articulating the simple themes running through the tracks through a careful use of both “emptiness” and layering. At times, it employs a “minimalist” school approach that, in the shifts of slight and almost imperceptible variations on a circular repetition, avoids the paranoid obsessive drift in favor of an overall fluidity.

Because it is liquid, “Seawards,” and so often are its guitars.
And, in some cases, dreamlike.
It is dazzling and blurred, like the backlit gaze of the cover.
It is, at times, hypnotic.
It is soft and flowing.
But rippled by a breath that branches out rivulets of reverberations.
It is ecstatic. When, before or after the intertwined, exhausting runs of the guitars, it grants itself the quiet of reflection.
Suspended arpeggios, synchronized breathing with the wave.
It is patient. When it waits for over 11 minutes for the energies to condense that we will hear unfolded at the end of one of the two long tracks (approximately 16 and 23 minutes) placed almost at the conclusion. Or the tension that will explode in the heart of the other, before a trail dotted with interferences concludes it.

The muted percussion, the presence of strings and winds that “color” some moments, like the discreet intervention of electronic sounds dissolved in the homogeneous sonic substance, always remain organic to the overall sound, to the atmosphere that the album is able to create and carry for the 70 minutes of this journey.
Which starts (or ends? The circular nature of certain paths probably nullifies or eludes the question)
next to that boat, facing a sea almost invisible to our eyes due to the excess of light.

Yes. It seems to me that the photograph chosen for the album cover effectively condenses some of the elements that nurture it: spaces, light, fluidity.
And the woody concreteness of a boat.
The concreteness that sometimes, some objects have in dreams.