Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Seeming (Finale Part two, day five) (Patreon)

1/14 Seeming’s 2020 The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity

The album’s Bandcamp page declares it to contain “ten ways to survive until tomorrow.” It certainly is that thing; I know I’ve shared “Remember to Breathe” with friends who were in a bad place over the last four years. (And who here hasn’t had to stop and remember to breathe—they’ve been a rough four years.) 

The song starts gently. His voice is the melodic instrument in this song—where a synth, or strings might go, there’s “ah ah ah”s accompanied with some gentle percussion.  We are remembering to breathe, after all, and there is no more apt instrument. It has the effect of bringing you in close and making the song intimate, and Alex stands bare in front of his lyrics.

“Remember to breathe
Cause you’re in this for the long haul”

No, wait, let me start over and match that honesty with my own. I lost my chosen sibling, Alley, to suicide and systemic medical neglect in February of 2022. They were chronically ill, and the NHS was failing them miserably. We’d been talking about that the day I asked them if I could be their brother, only informing El that we had a new member of the family after. I sent this song to them once. I always knew I’d lose them to suicide if not to their illness, but while they could still bare to remember to breathe I know it gave them comfort. 

That’s largely down to the sheer emotional honesty of the song. I’m not exactly in the habit of sharing anti-suicide media with people–by in large it tends to be condescending and sugary sweet. Don’t go! You have so much to live for! It gets better! Except, sometimes it doesn’t get better, and no one who’s ever been suicidal has ever been unaware of that as a possibility. But “Remember to Breathe” isn’t trying to be melancholy or uplifting. It’s angry and vulnerable; Alex has a seething manic fury at having to feel this way in the first place. 

“Like a tall tree I am pining
To be taken out by the lightning
Strike me
I dare you
I dare you
Heaven hear me”

With that, he swings from anger to bargaining on a dime, before the song takes its own advice, remembers to breathe, and returns to the calm acceptance it opens with. Because as most anyone who’s had ideation can tell you, there’s not really a “and now it’s all better” moment. If it ever gets better, it does so slowly, and it has to be won over and over. This song isn’t about getting out from under the ideation—that’s more than a song could ever do. It’s about surviving until tomorrow.

More, it’s small reasons he gives for not doing it today, which are nevertheless some of the best ones I’ve heard. I can’t tell you how often “I didn’t do it today/Cause I don’t want you to have to deal with the cops” pulses through my mind. 

“Remember to Breathe” ends with a moment of silence, and a gasp. This is solidly the kind of attention to detail you can expect out of a Seeming record, and is one of the things I love most about his music. Every element of a Seeming song feels deliberate; You can hear the care and attention that goes into them, without them ever feeling lifeless in their construction.

That is a thing I value a lot in art, and in my friends; as a result, Alex is one of my favorite people in town that I’m not married to. He’s just a genuinely interesting and careful person—the kind of person who’s clearly always thinking about something, noticing something else, and working on yet a third thing. Probably while the equivalent of a streaker runs through his mind with a megaphone. 

Unsurprisingly, I came to know him and his music through El. I actually remember the first time she played a song for me. It was in front of my abusive boyfriend, who rightly saw El as a threat. I’d mentioned that my favorite band was Placebo, and El just lit up. Oh, she had something to show me, and I was going to love it. I did, of course, and my ex loudly did not. That would have been ThouShaltNot—the band before Seeming, which was more straightforwardly a goth act. I liked ThouShaltNot quite a lot, and was disappointed when I heard the project was retiring, but Seeming has been great from the start, and he levels up with SOL in 2017.

SOL: A Self-Banishment Ritual, as the title may imply, is a beast of a record, adding a dark funk edge to his sound. Following that record with something else shaped like it would have been setting himself up to fail, if not in that record, then eventually; one always loses an arms race with one’s self, eventually. And so the emotional heart of the record is its second track: “Go Small.”

“Write the song you need to hear
When you’ve done it, tell me how.”

It is a very kind song, but the sort of kind that is ragingly furious—he’s dreamt of gutting billionaires again, and maybe there’s hope in the world you build around yourself. Write that song you need to hear, plant a garden in your head.

Go small.

Perfect for: dreaming of a future that will be borderless and red and queer and bold