dreamy, surreal rock

Are You Driving Me Crazy? (Touch & G0)

Seam

By Mark Clark

Ever have one of those dreams where you're sitting around your house (well, actually, it's a 60-room mansion and not the dumpy apartment where you really live, but this is a dream so you don't notice) then all of a sudden Miles Davis appears and asks you to walk his dog. Only it's not a dog, it's a big purple lizard on a leash — and then all of a sudden it's not a lizard, it's Winona Ryder, naked, on a leash. And then you realize, "Hey, this is way too freaky for reality. I must be dreaming." But it's a cool dream, so you just go with it.

Seam is kind of like that. Dreamy. Surreal.

You don't listen to Are You Driving Me Crazy so much as the album simply creeps into your consciousness. The band's lyrics are all but indecipherable, delivered in a stage whisper and buried under hypnotic waves of chiming, jangly guitar and urgent drum fills.

The result is very Murmur. If it's impossible to tell exactly what any of the album's ten songs are about, it's equally impossible to deny the evocative, emotionally suggestive power of the compositions. "Rainy Season" just sounds wistful, "Port of Charleston" melancholy. And so on.

Perfect music for rainy weekend afternoons.