Dream-pop
"Kissing The Gunner's Daughter" is the new album from Sea Above, Sky Below, aka Seb Pidgeon. The project started life as a series of bedroom recordings, and culminated in this new record, written and recorded over an 18 month period. Immediately the opener, 'November', has a twang of Cocteau Twins about it, but also in the background a kind of Orb, Ultramarine-ish ambient electro tone emerges. Seb's influences are obviously firmly in dream-pop and shoegaze, with the aforementioned Cocteau Twins springing to mind often as well as masters of fuzz like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive and occasionally The Sundays and contemporaries Asobi Seksu.
Along with those sweeping walls of noise the album also has a strong electro element throughout, which, although it may be a feature of the original bedroom nature of the recordings on "Kissing The Gunner's Daughter", is also a driving force here and informs the direction of the album, pulling the tracks firmly into electro-pop territory at times.
Seb's songs are melodic and of course, very dreamy, with their roots in folk; on tracks like 'Whispers On The Stairs' you can hear the acoustic guitar still in the background under the jangly layers and his light, floaty vocal style keeps things light. There is much to like on this atmospheric record, despite the gentle, airy nature of the songs it is not an album to put on as background music, rather it grabs and holds your attention because the melodies are so arresting, because there are often moments where the layers swell in volume and because there is so much going on in the background, you may find yourself quickly cranking up the volume and settling in to listen to the whole thing in one sitting.