The Baby Seals - 'Lips Are Sealed' EP

Like the dropping of a mento into a bottle of fizzy pop, the Seals offer a volatile blast of punk rock that celebrates the normalcy of bodily oddities on tracks like ‘Nipple Hair’ (“Choosing smooth is cool, but you still have choices, you don’t have to listen to the Gillette or Venus voices”) and the monthly visitor on ‘Period Drama’ (“it only ever happens when you’re out on a run/ Or you’re sat at work in a white dress on a pale seat”). But they deliver their stories with a cool refinement, swerving the snarling histrionics of bands like Hole that sometimes made murky the depth of their content. It’s tempting to view the song titles as cheeky parody after you have listened to how great the songwriting is.

 

Musically they stick for the most part between fast and medium pace heads-down thrash but temper it with theatrical stops, tempo hand-brake turns and dynamic shifts worthy of the Dead Kennedys. Further parallels to that band can be drawn with Kerry Devine’s preference for a cleaner guitar tone like that of East Bay Ray as well as her deployment of simple but devastating bar-chorded garage-rock riffs.

Beyond the stuttering choruses and f-bombs (of which there are many), there’s a real gift for pop-chops and invention that foretells of a band that may well turn their own audiences expectations inside out with future records. Currently, they’re a band who you can imagine blasting out of a radio that will probably never be played on the radio. In other words, they’re the real deal.

Rich

https://soundcloud.com/thebabyseals/sets/lips-are-sealed-2