Seaweed Mustache
What a great charades suggestion
September 30th, 2024
Seaweed Mustache is a fairly interesting band. I can’t remember how I stumbled across them, but the art for their EP The Whistle caught my eye, and the music itself made me stick around. Bassist and vocalist Jeong Jooyi’s sweet vocals paired very well with guitarist Choi Jihoon’s warm cleans and hoarse, almost feral growls and grunts. The following album, Bombora, leaned much heavier on shoegaze and recruited members Lee Wanki and Ban Jaehyeon for a fuller, fuzzy sound that left a lot of their heavier aspects as accents rather than mainstays. Imagine my surprise when I found the aptly named 2, their second LP and a phenomenal blend of their heavier sounds with the fuzzier shoegaze they grew into after a long hiatus.
The album opens with “FALL”, beginning with metallic bass that is soon buried in an avalanche of harmonized vocals and distorted, washing guitars. Much more like something on Bombora but with melodies more akin to The Whistle, it feels like a perfect marriage of the ethereal, spacey sound they’ve developed over the years. The churning bassline continues beneath the thick guitars and distant melody, creating a sort of contrast between these free sounding guitars and a machine composed of drums and bass.
The next song is an immediate highlight, with “HEX” feeling much more frantic and off-balance at many points. Jooyi’s calm spoken word over the guitars that seem to hug her bass feel very commanding but never too oppressive, meaning Jihoon’s altered, forced roars paired with chugging guitars feels like a weight that was once suspended has just fallen on top of you. As if that same weight had pinned the song down, it seems to blossom with more expressive vocals and more forward guitars after it is set free. It continues into harmonized guitars and an oddly lax blast beat, taking the suffocating commands and growls from earlier to an entirely new place.
“DAL” continues on with the freeing sound, with this massive, mid-pace wave of sound sitting beneath Jooyi’s singing. The block of distortion pauses for a more overdriven melody to bleed through, but just when we feel as though we can relax into that melody for the third time, it breaks into a faster, ascending wave that prepares us for a formless, yet gorgeous solo. This song best highlights my favorite aspect of Seaweed Mustache, being how their sound feels so genuine and jagged in an almost comforting way.
An especially uncomforting song is “CTF”, which features a more panicked sounding lead melody that disappears into grimy bass, overlapping guitars, and gentle spoken word by Jihoon. This song feels as though they wanted to cut loose and make something heavy, and the prolonged wait for Jihoon’s more professional sounding gutturals is all the sweeter when they finally arrive. His transition from monstrous roars into more human shouts is goosebump-inducing, and it makes the return to the calm all the more cathartic. As if to give one final hurrah, the final minute is a pulse pounding melody that feels as though it’s rushing you out the door before the abrupt end.
“18YEARS” welcomes you back in, with overdriven guitars and snappy snare soon thickening as Jooyi’s vocals come in once again. If “CTF” was a nasty, slobbery dog trying to press through the fence to get you, its predecessor is a dog whose only dangerous trait is whether or not it’ll knock you over in its single-minded excitement. The continued guitar chords sitting beneath a vaguely dissonant guitar lead in the verses feels gigantic but open, and adds layers before they’re torn away by a switch to chugging guitars and yet more harsh vocals from Jihoon. The loss of melody so suddenly is quickly fixed by the addition of an upbeat melody atop the guitars, and they tie off the sudden surprise by a return to the wordless chorus followed by yet another verse, though the latter almost feels more familiar due to Jooyi’s comforting voice.
Contrasting the tone of “18YEARS” is the slow and sad “SWEETHOME”, featuring some beautiful shimmering guitars and quiet, almost lullaby-like singing from Jihoon. The other guitar provides distorted, distant tremolo melodies that only accent how sad the song sounds, both highlighting the lack of sonic heaviness but also simply elevating the mood. Jihoon’s singing soon turns to quiet, frustrated shouts and roars that feel genuinely hurt and lost. While I can’t understand what he’s shouting, the lyrics seem to tell a very simple song about how we’ll all eventually die and need to wipe one another’s tears.
Following this is the much heavier “GAHNG”, which is another return of Jihoon’s roars in a heavier context. The rhythmic, breathless grunts are broken up by some beautiful, soft singing with the more familiar, thick fuzz that we’ve become accustomed to in their softer songs. This song feels much more rhythmic than a lot of their other songs on display, with less instrumental melody and nothing except Jihoon’s clean interjections to satiate that need. Before we can miss the soaring guitars for too long, they return to guide us towards the end of the song with some phenomenal drums as the beautiful soundscape fades, and fades it does. In fact, if I had one criticism of this track, it’s that the fade is almost laughably slow, with a whole minute of the 6 minute 30 second track dedicated to fading out.
The well-named “GOODBYE” features a return to the thick, shoegazey guitars we’ve come to know, which soon turn to chugging between gigantic chords beneath Jooyi’s sorely missed vocals by this point in the album. The alternation between the thick waves of shoegaze-themed guitar and transition into more metal-like chugging is played perfectly, with a focus on the prior due to the latter’s increasing prevalence with such a long stretch without Jooyi’s singing. That singing is perfectly meshed with Jihoon’s vocals and a distant guitar melody that all follow the same shape and give a cathartic sense of unification. By the end of the song, the guitars have slowly swallowed everything, until you can only faintly feel the bass and hear the drums continuing to play while half of the band seems to turn into a thick, sudden soundscape. The song ends with Jooyi’s faint singing, swaddled in a bed of noise and housed in a sort of radio filter.
With that, 2 is complete, and you’re given a reprieve from the static in the last 20 seconds of the album. I find every melody nothing short of intoxicating, making the album a can of earworms and space-themed glitter. My only criticism is how long the fade on “GAHNG” is, but that’s hardly a problem when sandwiched between such phenomenal music. They’ve done a great job of making the audience want more of an aspect, and I find that they, without fail, know just when to bring something back for maximum impact. Things that make the band stick out, such as Jooyi’s voice or the solo on “DAL” only serve to make me love them more, and I cannot recommend this album more if you can tolerate a bit of singing that may not be what you’re used to.