Sea Moss - SEAMOSS2 [Vinyl]

Hitting play on SEAMOSS2, the latest missive from Portland noise-tinkerers Sea Moss, is like punching the big red button on a cartoon bomb before it explodes into a multicolored mushroom cloud. From the second “Nap Time” revs up, vocalist Noa Ver and drummer Zach D'Agostino absolutely clobber the listener with a distorted hodgepodge of sounds as raw and violent as they are winkingly playful, as if Black Dice and Melt-Banana were caught in the middle of some kind of psychotic square dance together.

The duo’s setup—which involves a primitive assemblage of hacked feedback oscillators, colorful Rococo tin boxes, and a contact mic plugged directly onto Ver’s neck to capture her barking intonations—harkens back to an era of DIY where live performance meant everything. Blurring the line between reckless improvisation and tightly-knit compositions, the band achieves a disorientingly complex interplay. Though Sea Moss’s music may initially seem to be an act of pure blunt force, the duo’s true prowess lies in the intricacy of their rhythmic interplay. As freeform as it all might seem, SEAMOSS2 contains the band’s most potent, precise compositions yet, refining the distinct style they forged on disorienting releases like Bread Bored and Bidet Dreaming into a thrilling act of controlled chaos.

In an era where the communal spirit of DIY feels more difficult to achieve than ever, Sea Moss embody the classic ethos of weirdo punk music in all its absurdity and wonder. It’s this same sense of scrappiness that’s earned them attention from legends like Lightning Bolt and Machine Girl, and SEAMOSS2 illustrates why they’re every bit as deserving of their own trophy in the noise-rock hall of fame—one adorned in broken contact mics and scuffed-up scratches from one too many bloody basement shows.