Vondelpark - Seabed (2013)

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Vondelpark - Seabed (2013)

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Vondelpark learned the virtues of patience the hard way. In 2009, when the UK trio's members were still well within their teens, their melodramatically doomy band Lion Club scored what must've felt like a huge break: Converse picked them to be the subjects of a 50-minute documentary on the travails of being in an emerging rock group. It isn't clear exactly what happened next, but tastes change, talent matures, and by August 2010, Vice posted a (no-longer-online) interview cheekily titled, "Vondelpark Has No MySpace, So You Can Only Learn About Him Here." A few months later, Vondelpark released the first of two EPs.

I bring up this history to reinforce how impressive Vondelpark's transformation has been. When singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Lewis Rainsbury told Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal that Rainsbury, guitarist/bassist Alex Bailey, and keyboardist Matt Law are "really the first band" on electronic-oriented Belgian label R&S, he wasn't kidding about the band part. Seabed is the fullest realization yet of the project's immersive smoothness, but what helps Vondelpark's debut album stand out in a deluge of "Radiohead quietstorm" is that full-band quality, the organic fluidity of a unit who've been playing together for years.

These days Vondelpark are so unhurried it's almost counterproductive. Seabed arrives at a time when late-night, half-lit, occasionally blue-eyed R&B, often with the disembodied samples and digital silences of UK bass music, has grown so abundant it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to throw up your hands and go back to old Sade and Burial records instead. But Vondelpark's gradually acquired sense of restraint is so crucial to the album that its slightly overdue release timing feels symbolically appropriate, like the bass that falls behind the beat throughout D'Angelo's surrealistic-soul touchstone Voodoo. When you're eyeing the long haul, there's no rush.

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Seabed stretches out in a state of ecstatically aching limbo, gazing at the groove instead of shoes. The record's expansive sense of chronology manifests its in the first seconds of swaying ethereal opener "Quest", as Rainsbury, in his mumbly croon, keeps doubling back over his thoughts about growing old and flying to the moon. The title track describes a melancholy romantic holding pattern– "I won't say it, if you won't say it … You will realize"– as subdued synth-funk cycles toward its own just-out-of-reach epiphany. The largely beatless "Closer", where Rainsbury vows he's "never getting off this rollercoaster," conjures a weightlessness that's more astronaut than amusement-park free-fall.

In true Vondelpark style, Seabed is less a vast improvement on its predecessors than a subtle refinement. "California Analog Dream", reworked from 2010's Sauna EP, adds ghostly harmonica and a more pristinely recorded acoustic guitar, bringing the song's San Diego fantasy closer to classic 1980s UK indie-pop. But the dubwise horns and beatific bongos of 2011's nyc stuff and nyc bags EP, itself more polished than the debut, quite rightly led Pitchfork's Hari Ashurst to cite the sadly defunct Air France, who also mixed indie-pop vulnerability with sonic luxuriance. The pacific glow of Aretha Franklin-sampling "Bananas (On My Biceps)" has little more than a title in common with Sauna's grittier "Backflip (In the Sauna)", but the clean keys and distended drums of "Outro 4 Ariel" wouldn't be out of place on nyc stuff's "Outro for NYC".

Rainsbury, Bailey, and Law showed long ago that they could draw a crowd with a bold gesture, but Seabed's appeal after multiple listens is in its details. Bailey told London in Stereo his favorite song on the record is "Blue Again", a mood piece with melismatic, near-incomprehensible vocals, a crisp drum pattern that comes perilously close to smooth jazz, and a strangely familiar, pinging sound that's like an Apple computer telling you the cursor has gone too far. "Dracula", which submerges itself in sub-bass-y self-loathing, is no less appealing. But the most enduring track might also be the record's most overtly romantic: "Always Forever", a Drake-inspired dip into Mellow Mellow territory, where lyrical "tripping" suggests lovestruck clumsiness as much as psychedelics, and Rainsbury's "just saying" that you're having, he's having, a time (the time?) "of your life," so "go on." Much the same could be hoped for this studied young band.

Review by Marc Hogan, Pitchfork.com

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Vondelpark - Seabed (2013)

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Vondelpark - Seabed (2013)

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Vondelpark - Seabed (2013)

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