Oakland
Nowhere Lands The Seshen Somewhere New
by | Oct 27, 2023 9:38 am
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Posted to: Music
After more than a decade The Seshen deliver their fourth full-length LP, “Nowhere,” their most complete project to date.
Sarah Bass Photos
Lalin St Juste, lead singer of The Seshen.
The Seshen with Boostive
“Nowhere” Album Release Party
The New Parish
Oakland
Oct. 20, 2023
As friends and I gathered to attend The Seshen’s album release party for Nowhere, their outstanding new LP, our conversation arrived at a place it often does when this band comes up: “Why aren’t they a bigger deal?
Akiyoshi Ehara.
Sonically Nowhere is The Seshen’s most cohesive project to date. The band has been a fixture on the Bay Area scene for more than a decade. Nowhere represents the fourth full-length effort in an impressive catalog that also includes a handful of EPs and remix projects. At times they have seemed on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough. Their excellent 2014 single “Unravel” prompted a slew of worthwhile remixes. The following LP, Flames and Figures, their first on the UK indie label Tru Thoughts, had all the makings of a springboard to indie darling status.
In our rideshare on the way to the venue for last Friday night’s release event, our driver, a particularly affable, hip-presenting, fellow named Diamond, chimed in, “That’s my friend’s band. I went to Expressions with Kumar … They are hella slept on!” We spent the rest of the ride playing the new album, starting with “Hold Me,” a bouncy recent single thatsounds right at home alongside artists like Little Dragon, Santigold, Phantogram, Jungle, and Haitus Kayote.
Where prior albums have broadened to include new wave, synthpop, and even classic rock flourishes, this latest record arrives at a more focused and disciplined place in terms of songwriting and arrangements.
“On this album, I set out for a little bit less in the way of big peaks and valleys. I had a lot of fun jumping around in different genres, but this album landed a bit more of a cohesive space,” Akiyoshi Ehara, the band’s bassist and primary songwriter, told me.
Nowhere’s cohesiveness is somewhat ironic as the project was conceived, written, and recorded following the dissolution of the marriage between Ehara and the band’s other principal, frontwoman and lyricist Lalin St Juste. The couple had been together for 13 years prior to their 2019 divorce. “A lot of our songwriting is Lalin and I going back and forth,” said Ehara. “It was the emotional state we were in and a lot of where we were at the time.”
Knowing this makes the gentle melancholic resolve of songs like “Nothing Left To Say” and “Close My Eyes” even more textured. As a band, The Seshen has never sounded more contemplative or OK with stillness. As Ehara puts it, the album “really is a genuine expression of two people going through a really big transition and managing to stay connected to one another.”
St Juste
The song that seems to most directly confront heartbreak is the gorgeously somber “Watching The Rain,” which opens…
“Looking for nothing,
hoping for something,
needing a reason,
to stop thinking of you”
These lines seem to tumble out of St Juste with forlorn yet bouncy jazz that evokes the second movement of Erykah Badu’s masterful heartbreak suite “Green Eyes.”
Onstage, St Juste is a star. Always impeccably styled, she moves about the stage with a theatrical dancer’s allure, grace, and precision. This past weekend’s release-party performance was no exception, as she stalked the small New Parish stage in a royal blue pantsuit accented by a white bra and white cloth belt.
Meanwhile, the rest of The Seshen presented as session musicians often do: more concerned with music than image or performance. This contrast was made all the more glaring by the arrangement on the stage: percussionist Mirza Kopelman was foregrounded, both by position and lighting, as much as the lead singer, presenting a challenge to St Juste owning the room.
Merch! Good merch, that is.
At its best, The Seshen’s live show takes the programmed drum-driven groove of their recorded music and adds a healthy dose of organic percussion and other sweeteners. When the mix is just right this can make attending a Seshen show a lagniappe to enjoying their recorded music. Sadly, for the first half of last Friday’s set the soundman struggled to find a mix that balanced the band’s propulsive low-end and abundant accents in a way that still allowed space for the vocals to be heard. For all her strengths, St Juste is not the sort of singer who can overpower a poor mix.
Thankfully adjustments were made, and by the set’s final third, the power of songs like “Take It All Away” from the band’s 2020 album Cyan and “Fallen Skies” from Flames and Figures reminded us just how special this band is. By the time “Hold Me” was delivered to close the show, it was clear that an encore would be demanded. After a brief exit from the stage, The Seshen returned for a two-song curtain call that concluded with “Oblivion,” the breakout tune from their 2012 debut. “Oblivion” held the room rapt, demonstrating that the majority of the crowd had likely been engaged with this band for several years.
It is a testament to the band’s proficiency that after 11 years of refinement and the romantic break-up of their two lead members, the sounds of their very beginning still resonate. Ehara calls it, “an arrival at yourself.” In this sense, The Seshen has absolutely “made it,” no matter how elusive their due notoriety remains.
