SEEFEEL - Succour (Redux) - 3LP - Gatefold Sleeve Vinyl

On Seefeel’s 1993 debut album, Quique, the British quartet navigated a course between shoegaze and ambient dub—but by 1995, the electronic undercurrents of their sound had carried them to a very different place. Maybe it was the influence of Aphex Twin, whose remixes had honed in on the clean-lined rhythmic skeleton lurking beneath the group’s atmospheric swirl: The rolling, distorted drums of Succour’s “Fracture” and “Vex” are straight out of his playbook, and the beatless, bookending tracks “Meol” and “Utreat” both evoke Selected Ambient Works Vol. II at its most ethereal.

While the album’s textures and titles are often reminiscent of Autechre’s Amber, which came out the year before on Warp, Seefeel never entirely cast off their post-rock roots; squint through the fog of songs like “Extract” and “Cut,” and you can just barely pick out the familiar silhouettes of guitar, bass, drums, and microphone against the murk. Still, there’s no mistaking the common cause they make with the era’s knob-twisters and brain-dancers. Despite the echoes of other touchstones of the time (“Gatha” sounds like Massive Attack being dragged deep into an underwater cavern), it’s a singular album that has no equivalent—a sound so elemental, it’s no wonder the Designers Republic chose the cover they did.