Before even pressing play on Seapony’s debut album Go With Me, there is a certain sense of knowing exactly what you’re in for. The front cover of a washed-out photo of a trendy girl at the seafront smacks of lighthearted, upbeat, summeriness, and that’s exactly what the music delivers in spades.
There can be no complaints about the style of music that Seapony make; it’s utterly inoffensive and fits right into the current dearth of bands that are taking 60s pop influences, adding some fuzz and raking in the fans. The problem here is a complete lack of variation from track to track.
The set up here is clap-along drums, one fuzzy guitar, another guitar picking out the melody and singer Jen Weidl singing prettily, but with little variation, about various love quandaries. Seapony are by no means the only band to create a blueprint and run with it, but the one used consistently over Go With Me’s 12 tracks is so simple that it can quickly become one big blur. The tracks are most likely to be remembered and put into personal preferential order by listening to the different tunes being played on the guitar and deciding which one is catchiest, since more or less everything else is identical from track to track.
That’s not to say that Go With Me does not have any merit whatsoever. If you’re looking for something not too taxing to fill the silence on a slow day, this album is more or less perfect. But continual plays are going to wear this album thin very quickly. It’s not as though Seapony put themselves across as completely incapable either. It would have been nice to hear a slower song, or even one with minimal instrumentation so we can get to know our singer and her troubles, but as it is we get a vague idea of what she’s going through, but we don’t particularly care.
The bottom line is that the standout songs such as “Nobody Knows,” “So Low” and “Go Away” are really fun and infectious, and the rest of the album follows suit, just a little too closely. Go With Me is like a big box of popcorn; it’s tasty and it can be improved by the circumstances under which you’re enjoying it, but by the end you’re barely even tasting it anymore, and it certainly won’t quell your appetite for a proper meal.
