Seal, Human Being

I take a lot of shit for liking Seal. I would say he's my premiere guilty pleasure, except I don't feel the slightest bit guilty when I listen to his music. A case could be made that Seal represents a craft taken to its furthest extreme: No sonic detail escapes the microscope that Seal's cadre of very expensive producers hold to his recordings; immersing yourself in the lushness of Human Beings, it comes as no surprise that he takes four years to make a single album.

All of this served to inform a joke I started making when there was news of a new Seal album, back in October of 1998. I was studying in London and every time my friends and I were in a tube station and walked past one of the ads for the new album, a giant poster featuring his nude, ridiculously muscular physique, I'd say "Man, that new Seal album had better be good." Because if it wasn't, it meant two things: 1) I'd have to defend him to his many detractors among my friends, as I did when his disappointingly disappointing latest album Seal (IV) was released last fall; and 2) We'd all have to wait at least four more years for him to redeem himself.

Well, fortunately, Human Beings did not disappoint. At least, it didn't disappoint me. I wasn't anticipating it so feverishly that I absolutely had to have it the day it was released. But for some reason, probably boredom because my flatmates were doing homework and didn't want to go out, I took the tube down to the nearest HMV the night it came out and purchased it. This was also around the time that I began falling pretty hard for one of those selfsame flatmates. Smitten and girlsick throughout the month of November, I had that album on my headphones constantly, whether I was walking down to Hart's at midnight for donuts or waiting in line for lunchtime pizza at the corner, or on the train up to Edinburgh, or having a beer in the pub next to the laundromat while I waited for my clothes to dry.

This album stands apart from Seal's others, not only in name, but also in mood. These songs are by far the darkest of his ouevre. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the album artwork on his other three is predominantly white or silver, while here it is dark blue and magenta, deep purple and black. This is not a summer album. The leadoff track, "Human Beings", received some press for ostensibly being about the Tupac and Biggie saga, though I'm not sure what specifically points to this in the lyrics. It's an uncompromising reminder of mortality, to be sure; the chorus�we're mere human beings, we die / it's destined�couldn't be more straightforward. This is a considerable distance from the comparitively hopeful "Don't Cry" on his previous album, or the ridiculous dance anthems on his latest. This track is reprised at the end of the album�perhaps the one tradition Seal didn't eschew for this release�but rather than reaffirming any positive message, it only strips what little hope may be left at the end of the song cycle, with Seal proclaiming that "love dies" over a tidal string arrangement, finishing the album with the inconclusive and hardly promising lines chasing away, feels like I'm chasing nowhere / doing whatever I feel / I just keep falling down.

In between these mercurial bookends are countless moments of true beauty, melancholy and otherwise. "State Of Grace" couches a usual theme�doubts about love�in a swaying, muted drum loop, the vocals mixed farther to the front than ever. Restraint, at least from a production standpoint, is the order of the day: while the orchestra may be working overtime and the multi-tracked vocal harmonies are as lush as ever, these songs have an almost claustrophobic intimacy to them. "Colour" is a tight dirge of a waltz, full of dark seventh chords, so that by the time Seal comes to the pivotal line God only knows what we put in that paint, we're so far under the covers, his growling lament is our only connection to the world outside these walls, and it's a tenuous one at best. "Latest Craze" is the closest thing the album had to a digestible single, and while it is buoyant and driving, it seems deceptively so: if the song is about hedonism, as it most surely seems to be, then the morning after can't be far off. Indeed, the final lyric of the song�I'm doing something / frankly, I don't think that I should�is delivered a capalla, and segues immediately into the sublime chord progression of "Just Like You Said", a near-perfect breakup song. Everything, from the super-dry drum sound to the spare Rhodes piano, to the ascending vocal line of the chorus, is dead-on and engineered to make you ache. Much the same for "Still Love Remains", the orchestral scope of which is so bittersweet, so simultaneously intimate and epic, that it's hard for me to listen to now: The ghostly sustained guitar figures that fill in the gaps in the relatively sparse arrangement, the unanticipated interlude on heavily-strummed acoustic guitar coming like a too-brief breath of fresh winter air, the desperate falsetto chorus�it all conspires to make me recall that cold walk down Gloucester Road.

Maybe this is all colored by nostalgia, and there's nothing I can do about that; the memories we associate with certain music are both a blessing and a curse, and it's usually impossible to divorce the music from the context in which it first became alive for us. I remember a few months ago, when it was still plenty cold in the city, I got off work and wasn�t quite ready to go home, so I walked around the Loop for a while, just listening to this album on my iPod. Toward the end of the album I descended into the Blue Line station to take the train home, and the chilly air seeping in from above, the wind emerging from the train tunnel, the end-of-the-day exhaustion, that universal subway smell�it wasn't so different from that Picadilly tube hole six years ago.

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