SEUM — Parking Life album review by Mark J. It's the (gritty/abrasive)sound of slowing down under the weight of things.

 SEUM — Parking Life (Black Throne / Self-Released)

SEUM — Parking Life album review by Mark J. It's the (gritty/abrasive)sound of slowing down under the weight of things.

(Montréal, QC)

No guitars. That was always the provocation. But if you've spent any time with Seum — and if you haven't, go fix that immediately — you know that Piotr's bass doesn't fill the space a guitar would occupy. It creates an entirely different architecture. Heavier at the bottom, more exposed at the top, with Gaspard's vocals given nowhere to hide and nowhere to perform. Just there, inside the din, meaning what they say.

Parking Life is their third studio album, and it comes with a thesis: loneliness, boredom, unsatisfying work, addiction, broken hearts. The ordinary wreckage. And Seum are not interested in dressing it up. Mastered by Chris Fielding — who's run the desk for more essential heavy records than I can list — the whole thing has weight and presence without losing the DIY rawness that's always been the band's backbone.

Inspired by Eyehategod, Iron Monkey, Weedeater — the real sludge lineage, the stuff that came out of actual misery rather than genre affectation — Seum have always understood that sludge at its core is punk that stopped being able to move fast. It's the sound of slowing down under the weight of things. Parking Life understands that. These are songs about the slow grind of existing, the particular numbness of parking lot existence, the daily repetition that doesn't resolve into anything. And they play it with a tongue-in-cheek nihilism that's always been Seum's saving grace — the humour that keeps the thing from collapsing into self-pity.

Fred's drumming is the spine. Always has been. Piotr's fuzz is the flesh. Gaspard makes it human. Every track is sublime and crushing, as always.Each album adds some added flavour or a twist; this time there are some cleaner vocals. But still no compromise.What they've built across these three records is a body of work that matters inside and outside the genre. Parking Life is their most direct, their most nakedly thematic. Worth every minute.

Out 23rd April.

https://seumtheband.bandcamp.com/

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