As always, A Shoreline Dream seem to pose more questions than they present answers for with their latest release. Then again, if your music isn’t working that hard then perhaps it is just taking up too much space anyway. Seek To Hide is certainly a cluster of contradictions, one that will ponder notions such as – how can a band create a wall of sound which simultaniouly seems to be so spacious and opaque? How does it beat and bend such driving bass lines and crunching, angular guitars into a song which sounds so smoothly and elegantly textured? How can it suggest so many genres yet fit neatly into none of them?
I guess the appeal of their music lies in one further question. What is beauty? Obviously it is found in rolling hills, in elegant architecture, in perfect forms and unexpected radiance, but for many, it is also found in less obvious places. If you are the sort of person who finds a certain beauty in industrial decay, of rusting forms being subsumed by time and tide, in the slow descent of order into chaos, of the functional evolving into the purely ascetic then you will perhaps find the same process in sonic form in their music.
Seek To Hide is a collection of hard edged sounds and industrial grooves being subsumed by musical washes, stark forms being musically weathered beyond recognition. Rather than use such abrasive sounds to deliver a punkish punch, instead A Shoreline Dream weave it into rough yet pleasing designs which are more about poise than power, ambience than attitude, soundscaping than swagger.
And like all A Shoreline Dream songs, this latest single also begs one further question. Why don’t more people make music this adventurous, this windswept, this interesting?
