Seeker Lover Keeper’s eponymous first album has become a mainstay on my menu over the last few months during which I have got to know it. It consoles in despair and is company in elation.
Nominated at the 2011 Australian Recording Industry Awards for Best Adult (?) Alternative album, Seeker Lover Keeper is a super-band formed of some of Australia’s most notable singer-songwriters. Sarah Blasko, Holly Thornsy, and Sally Seltmann have created something that is very unique from what each of the ladies have made before as solo artists.
Beginning with the hushed and thoughtful Bring me Back, it goes onto the joyous and uplifting Light All My Lights and onto the album’s most memorable tracks, Even Though I’m A Woman – the video of which is a masterful feat of creativity in its own right. Bridges Burned is perhaps the most repetitive musically, but its lyrics capture perfectly that perennial feeling of being human – “I went the wrong way but I’m coming back stronger than before.”
The beautiful Rely on Me and the moving and sorrowful If The Night is Dark – a wonderful vista onto what it feels like to be a misfit – also stand out as highs points of the whole.
Each singer’s voice has its own distinctive flavour, but the shifting of lead vocals throughout the twelve tracks is unobtrusive and does nothing to impede the album’s flow. The songs – covering everything from separation to friendship, devotion, independence and confusion – ebb back and forth in tempo and feel and then onto completely new trajectories.
Never have the lyrics of any other album expressed so succinctly my feelings and situation in a particular period of life. Seeker Lover Keeper shall stay in my soul for years to come, along with the other milestone albums from my past.
