With members from
Broadcast and the criminally neglected
Plone,
Seeland could be considered a supergroup from Birmingham, England's early 2000s "retro-futurist" electronic pop scene. The songs on their debut album,
Tomorrow Today, certainly contain shades of their previous projects' sounds: "Colour Dream"'s whooshing and whirring is as sweetly strange and soothing as anything on
Plone's
For Beginner Piano, and "Pretty Bird" has more than a little of that band's nursery rhyme innocence; "Call the Incredible," with its trippy serenity, could easily pass for a
Broadcast song. Like their work with their previous bands,
Billy Bainbridge and
Tim Felton are experts at crafting detailed sounds that are a joy to marvel at as they flutter, overlap, and collide, such as "Goodbye"'s rippling synths and rattling percussion and "5 A.M."'s delicate layers of guitar and electronic doodles. But while
Broadcast sound like they're transmitting from somewhere far across the galaxy, and
Plone sounded like they were in a playroom crafting pocket symphonies on toy electronics,
Seeland finds a happy medium between those extremes on
Tomorrow Today. Their songs are rooted on terra firma, but with bits of spacy weirdness decorating their margins. And while
Felton is a somewhat limited singer, his voice's warmth -- which recalls
Super Furry Animals'
Gruff Rhys -- connects the tangents the music takes around him. The album's only misstep (and it's a tiny one) is "Static Object," where his vocal's innate friendliness doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the song's dark, sleek vibe.
Seeland also loves honest-to-goodness pop from every era, and that goes a long way toward distinguishing the band from its history. "Turnaround"'s lush, lavish choruses and chilly synth-strings pay charming homage to '80s synth pop, while the ping-ponging electronics, harpsichords, and twanging guitars on "Library" suggest a hybrid of '60s chamber pop and experimental electronic music, like a
Left Banke song recorded at BBC's Radiophonic Workshop.
Seeland's invention doesn't stop at recombining sounds from the past, however: "Hang on Lucifer" takes electro-rock in a very different direction than most of the band's contemporaries, with phaser-like synths and sprightly guitars dueling over a bubblegum melody. It took
Seeland five years to issue
Tomorrow Today, but it was time well spent -- these unique and immediate songs build on the band's past but never feel restricted by it.