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. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

1		Burning Pages
2		Hang On Lucifer
3		Colour Dream
4		Turnaround
5		Captured
6		Library
7		Goodbye
8		Static Objects
9		Station Sky
10		Call the Incredible
11		Five In the Morning
12		Pretty Bird

	Like us on Facebook
	@SoundHound	Follow