Album: Holding Onto Strings Better Left to Fray
Label: Wind-up
Rating: 4/5
Pain is a trait rarely desired. But when it helps to creatively fuel one’s own art, it can then be understood as an acceptable and worthwhile attribute to have. Seether’s Holding onto Strings Better Left to Fray is a painful expression of a wounded heart. Angry and volatile, it’s an album that proudly bears its soul to a willing audience.
Seether’s fifth studio release may not be an overly complicated construction, but it is an entertaining and endearing one. Revelling with angst-ridden glee, the album covers familiar territory (rock ballad included) but does it with a candid, albeit loud, perspective.
Throughout the band’s history, the music has tended to rely heavily on the tragic and melancholic while simultaneously incorporating (slight) catchy pop hooks with heavy guitar riffs and pounding bass lines. Holding relatively true to that blueprint, their latest release excels as a result of its emphasis on grungy and seedy explorations of expressive anger.
Some may write the enraged, isolated perspective of singer Shaun Morgan off as mere redundancy, but there is a profound energy that filters throughout his booming vocalisation. Driving and forceful, Morgan’s voice perfects a lonesome fragility in search of permanence.
Though seemingly straightforward, the album’s sound does occasionally diversify. Opening track “Fur Cue” and “Desire for Need” are explosive, in-your-face post-grunge rock outs, while “No Resolution” and “Country Song” are flavoured with a Southern rock twang that elicits boot thumping exuberance.
Though it may not be remembered six months from now, Seether’s latest release is actually their most intelligent and memorable album to date.
