Sydney Morning Herald Undertow Review
Leaning positive review of Mark Seymour’s Undertow album.
Author: Jeff Glorfeld, Sydney Morning Herald.
Date: 27 May 2011.
Original URL: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/the-undertow–mark-seymour-20110526-1f4u8.html
Reviewer rating: 3 out of 5 stars
He might have fronted one of the best-loved Australian bands of the 1980s and ’90s but Mark Seymour has moved on.
Nowadays, his guitar is more likely to be a strummed acoustic than a well-bashed Telecaster and the old blue singlet is somewhere down the back of the wardrobe.
This is a musician sounding completely at ease with who he’s become, though the voice is as distinctive as ever and the passion still apparent in his lyrics, including Legend of the Snowmen, dedicated to asbestos campaigner Tony Medina, and Eldorado, which marries Stones riffology to lyrics about the culture of consumption as epitomised by a certain casino.
Most of the songs are mid-tempo ramblers: opener Castlemaine is a jaunty nu-folk rocker; I Know Too Much About You is muscular pop with a great hook and sounds as if Seymour has been listening to brother Nick’s band Crowded House; Little Bridges features a terrific duet with the song’s co-writer Angie Hart.
Seymour has fun with taut rocker The Red Lady’s Gone, a lament about his stolen ’72 HQ Monaro, which borrows from the Hollies’ Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.
N/A.
