High School Hits # 2 (...an ongoing list of my top 5 favorite high school albums).

SEAM: THE PROBLEM WITH ME.

I remember sitting next to my relative's pool in the hot summer sun, listening to my newly purchased SEAM CD from a remote disc player leaned against the screen window of the pool house. My aunts, who were sunbathing at the time, told me to "turn that sh##t down!"....and I didnt blame them, because it seemed that everytime this band reached a soft melodious meditative place in their songs, they would blow up like a hand grenade and wreck everything pretty in the world. Exploding drums, cymbals, vocals, and feedback, wreaked havoc on my post-pubescent mind (and also made for a bad sunbathing experience)....my aunts cackled and told me this wasnt music. "Now that 'achey-breakey heart' song, THATS MUSIC!" More cackling.

....I pretended not to hear them, sprang high off the diving board, and landed one of the most biggest and baddest cannonballs recorded in human history.

While I like SEAM's other albums, I always return to this one. There's something timeless about it (as, hopefully, you find all of the albums on the top 5 list). When I first heard it, I felt like Sooyoung Park (the lead singer) had openned my mail, read it, and put music into my inmost thoughts (even though a high school junior/senior man-boy doesnt typically get much mail, journal, or write in many diaries for that matter, but you understand the metaphor...or hyperbole...whatever).

Again, you find just enough self-loathing (if that wasnt already apparent by the title) to appeal to any tween, yet they intertwine it so cleverly with strung out melodies and force, you could find yourself weathering through the first year of college with this album still rotating in your listening equipment. (Im serious. I annoyed the crap out of my freshman dorm-roomate with this one. )

The most attractive quality of this album is it's endearing character. The album is very accessible (maybe not quite "achey-breaky heart" accessible, but accessible still). Its open-armed, and inviting. Not so much aggressive, as confident. Humble, honest and straight-up are some other good adjectives to describe it. The album as a whole moves fluidly within itself and ends with a soft, ambient, volume steady guitar loop. Sooyoung is telling his own personal story, almost in the same way repeatedly, but from different angles, which in turn makes the songs narrative and intertwined.

That summer was a memorable one. It was the summer before I left my parent's nest in mid-Ohio for a college dorm room. The summer I worked blisters onto my fingers from work in a paint roller factory. The same summer I spent that hot August afternoon submerging and resurfacing under the water of my Aunt and Uncles pool....hearing this album go from opaque, muffled underwater garble to crisp audible hooks and swoons in the summer air. That is, until one of my aunts disturbed her sunbathing to shut it off. No matter, I soon bought the cassette and it was traveling with me down the road.