New release from English act Keith Seatman is called Sad Old Tatty Bunting (CASTLES IN SPACE CIS093), and it’s mostly a solo effort by him apart from Jim Jupp on one track, and his old sparring partner Douglas E Powell who adds his voice to ‘Burial at Bevill’s Leam’.
The inspiration for this album came to our man during lockdown, except this isn’t actually a “lockdown” album; the point of the story is that he went for walks by himself very early in the mornings in 2020 in his home town. Presumably he lives by the seaside as beach and prom are mentioned in his anecdote (update – he lives in Portsmouth). It was the sight of the abandoned bunting hanging at an old pub that set his mental cogs in motion; someone had forgotten to take it down, and as the weeks go by he sees it becoming more weather-beaten and tatty, hence the album name. I was hoping this sighting might be a cue for Seatman to wax lyrical about Englishness, faded glories, nostalgia for holidays by the sea, or memories of a festive event long since past. However, he’s somewhat more equivocal about it – “I realised [it] could refer to to many different concepts, ideas, places, books and things”, he states in the press note, as drily as any Open University tutor. In fact, it was Powell who came to hear the title as the name of a scarecrow, channelling the spirit of Worzel Gummidge no doubt.
I’d also like to think there was an opportunity for Seatman to build on the promise of Time To Dream But Never Seen (his 2020 LP) with its gaily-coloured cover art evoking circus posters and canal-barge art; Seatman always comes within a hair of saying something distinctive about English culture and its decline, or at least his own memories of it, but never quite seems to follow through on the hints and clues he drops. The music here is very jolly, anyway. We have the expected mix of synths and samples, this time with added disco beats, and as ever his technique is to create several quite dense layers of music, with many things happening at once; you could call it a kind of polyphony, but I think it’s not one that’s composed on sheet music, rather it’s assembled on the hard drive from a multitude of sources. It struck me with this record that perhaps Seatman is more of a mixologist than he is a composer; and even if I enjoy the fascinating whirl of colours, I’m still left vaguely unsatisfied as each track ends, wondering what happened to the melody. Even so, he controls his layers expertly, creating a deliriously cluttered sound, where the tone colours appear to be almost saturated.
He’s also busy creating stories, or fragments of stories, or at least impressions of them; each title is a chapter in the best story book you never owned as a child, and at least two of them – ‘The Grand Alchemists Parade’ and ‘Mrs Lawes & The Late Mrs Pomfrey’ could be the titles of novellas by lost 1950s English novelists. And despite the generally jaunty upbeat mood of the album, there’s no denying he’s still keen on flirting with mystery and uncanny elements, cleverly veering his tunes towards the stormy side of the sea before you even noticed he’s changed direction. Acting as chief painter providing shade to his light is Powell, with his spoken-word contribution to ‘Burial at Bevill’s Leam’, spinning a yarn that describes a Bronze Age burial site and gradually draws us into a horrifying occurrence involving unwelcome creatures, all quite worthy of James Herbert…and all the more effective for being disguised as a newspaper article being read out in his matter-of-fact voice. But you should also beam your horns towards ‘In the Fields Round The Back’, a nine-minute epic of supernatural impressions where Seatman turns his back on his beloved Rowntree’s Jelly posters and dares to explore an eerie pastoral wilderness in the manner of Alan Garner or Susan Cooper. This spookster is one I could file alongside the works of Wyrd Britain, except that Seatman’s much more of a maximalist, and not quite as strong at the art of suggestion. Even so, if you heard this mini-suite broadcast on any segment of UK television in 2022, you’d be amazed.
A worthy addition to anyone’s collection, and the presentation is gorgeous – Nick Taylor designed the colour covers and insert, emulating now long-forgotten printing techniques and old school book jacket illustration, and the LP is pressed in blue vinyl. From 23 February 2022.