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10 out of 10
Super Science Fiction is an extremely impressive debut album from The Seal Cub Clubbing Club. Brilliantly produced and with a style that is genuinely unique it's an album that you'd want to play time and time again instead of being one of those things you download only to get lost forever in the depths of the MP3 player.
You get the impression that there is no sound or instrument they wouldn't attempt to include if they felt it would contribute to a song successfully having described their sound as veering "dangerously close to being unlistenable without actually becoming so" and they're so right about that. I can't explain how any of it works but it really does.
The song that encompasses this most aptly is "Song for Haku" which starts off with an odd synth/organ melody then goes into an even stranger discordant vocal line sung over drones and samples. Eventually we are led unwittingly to a shouty middle section which is confusingly fascinating before dissipating into the next track.
It's so difficult to compare them to other bands as they encompass so many different sounds and styles that seem to culminate in a distinct style all their own rather than being an assorted miscellany of songs in no particular order, in other words they are not playing at trying to be different for the sake of it. In trying to find comparisons to The SCCC, it ranged from Architecture in Helsinki, Radiohead, Tunng, Hope of the States, even Louis XIV sprang to mind as well as Modified Toy Orchestra and 65 Days of Static.
.I could go on listing in an attempt to promote this music to people who like bands of similar style but I'd never really hit the nail on the head which makes me wonder if there could be anyone who wouldn't find something to like about them.
My personal favourite tracks are opening track, "World of Fashion" which begins as a cheeky, funk number, or so you would think until it builds and builds to a raucous bass driven, dark sounding melodic line. Just when you're getting into that you're hit with a cacophony of FX and distortion which then fades into elongated string chords that lead straight into "Lone Planet", an unexpectedly, up tempo song which again is a corker of a track making statements on life that are amusingly apt.
"3Ft of Air" could be best described as the ultimate radio-friendly, festival-tent sing along song. It's fun, it's happy and it sounds like a military march which lost its way and found itself picking up recorder playing hippies before making a swift detour to Glasto. If it's not used on Hollyoaks or Skins or in some BBC trailer in the next year I'd be surprised (but don't let that put you off!).
This could easily be one of the best albums of 2009 and I recommend it to anyone who. well, actually I just recommend it to everyone.
Listen: www.myspace.com/thesealcubclubbingclub
Tracklist:
1. World Of Fashion
2. Lone Planet
3. Aurienteering
4. 3Ft of Air
5. Song for Haku
6. Slow-Motion Power slide (In Dee)
7. Dawn Lamb
8. My Ten Acres
9. PSPM
10. Secrets
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