Album Review: Seedy Jeezus, Damned to the Depths
Posted in Reviews on August 12th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It is a heart-on-sleeve kind of album. Damned to the Depths is the third full-length from Seedy Jeezus. It finds the Melbourne-based three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Lex Waterreus, bassist Paul Crick and drummer Mark Sibson — now a foursome with Tony Reed (Mos Generator, Big Scenic Nowhere, lately of Pentagram) producing and in the lineup — offering their most expressive material to-date across two varyingly patterned sides, the first digging deep into a wistful heavy psychedelic blues rock and the latter doing much the same, but in the more progressive frame of a single piece broken up across seven smaller movements/tracks. That’s “Mourning Sea,” which is an inevitable focal point given that it’s posited as one 19-minute song on a 40-minute record, as opposed to the four standalone songs on the first half, the last of which served as the title-track of Seedy Jeezus‘s 2022 double-live-in-the-studio-during-lockdown LP, The Hollow Earth (discussed here).
A tie to that release, which spoke with instrumental passion about the human need for connection in the face of a time that denied it, is welcome, and the ‘album version’ of “The Hollow Earth” pushes even further into post-“Solitude”/”Planet Caravan” ambience than did the live one, as Seedy Jeezus bring in Kasinda Faase on flute to round out the classically progressive feel and give side A a subtle culmination en route to the ambitious pastures that follow. By then, the vibe has long since been set, as 6:27 opener and longest-track-with-an-asterisk (immediate points) “Is There All That Is” fades in with scorch inherited from “Barefoot Travellin’ Man,” which closed 2018’s Polaris Oblique (review here), as if to give the impression that the band are picking up where they left off. Not quite, as the initial moments of the record helicopter the listener from out of that energetic surge and into a stretch of more melancholy guitar and synth, longingly plucked notes and obscure voice samples, evocations of life support machines as Crick does the heavy lifting in keeping the song from coming apart before it’s started.
Atmosphere remains central to Damned to the Depths, and specifically as an artistic work representing loss and grief as a journey to be moved through rather than simply experienced, the album is not only Seedy Jeezus‘ most ambitious offering and most accomplished, but able to hold a sense of fluidity between songs and ideas that in many contexts would end up presented as disparate. “Golden Miles” dares a bit of strut amid its Pink–Floyd-declaring-things nod, taking the bluesy pulls and synthy/effects meditation that cap “Is There All That Is” — why do I feel like the question is giving me a headache? is the answer yes? — and transmuting it to a more ’70s-heavy groove. The feel is straightforward, but there’s still reach in the bridge and in Waterreus‘ soulful, live-feeling vocals, and though the second track is among the more active inclusions — there’s plenty of linearity to come, but not all of it is intended to swing — it works double as a crucial bridge between the opener and “Acid in the Blood.” Time kept by a bassline heartbeat, a burner solo cast into a “Maggot Brain”-type emptiness, the voice again almost humble in the space in Tony Reed‘s mix purposefully vast to emphasize its emptiness; it sounds like it’s late at night, and maybe it was when they recorded. I don’t know.
From its first cymbal wash through the last warm bass and flute notes, “The Hollow Earth” is both the ending of its own procession on the album’s first half, and the point at which they give over to “The Mourning Sea,” which introduces itself with dual lead guitars — could be Waterreus and Reed together, or could be layers — in “The Mourning Sea Pt. I Bargaining.” If we’re traveling across Damned to the Depths, then indeed “The Mourning Sea” emerges as both what we’re traveling on and the particular depths to which we’re damned. The multi-part epic solidifies and fulfills the album’s underlying concept, through the hard drums and almost theatrical crash-in of “The Mourning Sea Pt. II Pain” — with a proggy chug in the bass and kick drum that follows — and while self-contained in the sense that you could technically listen to each track on its own, the shifts between each part, some takeoffs willful in contrast, some as smooth as a transition across measures, make it plain that it was written to be an album unto itself, perhaps originally intended as the basis for both sides of Damned to the Depths but complemented by the scope of the tracklisting as it is.
The first vocals arrive with “The Mourning Sea Pt. III Denial,” along with a more grounded acoustic strum, building a tension that indeed explodes shortly after two minutes in, before settling back into a more restrained flow like nothing ever happened. Because of course. A sample from the 1968 spaghetti western This Man Can’t Die starts “The Mourning Sea Pt. IV Mourning Sun,” talking about death getting paid in gold instead of silver, and another acoustic-based movement follows. Here too the space is well used and the flourish on guitar ties into that Western impression as well by the end, with a keyboardy wash that rises to shift into organ and the serene drone later joined by voice on “The Mourning Sea Pt. V We Fade.” A sudden burst suits the arrival of “The Mourning Sea Pt. VI Breakthrough” both for the title and the let-go of the vocals at the end of the song prior, and although instrumental, the penultimate segment of “The Mourning Sea” still serves as the payoff for the extended piece and the album as a whole. That’s not a minor ask, but with cascading guitar and keys backing that immediate push in the song’s second half, an almost Beatles-y sway underneath the keyboard lines, “The Mourning Sea Pt. VI Breakthrough” comes through as different by the finish than it was at the start, and given the subject at hand, that’s obviously the idea.
That leaves the sub-two-minute instrumental “The Mourning Sea Pt. VII Why?” as something of an epilogue. Another sample with some last thoughts on death, keys-as-string sounds, acoustic strum, just a moment to dwell in before Damned to the Depths finishes. The keyboard there and throughout highlights Reed‘s contributions to the band — he’s worked with Seedy Jeezus before but is listed as a member of the group in addition to the producer, and some of the writing (those pulses in “The Mourning Sea Pt. II Pain,” just as a guess) bears his mark — but the expression throughout comes through as still largely personal to Waterreus, and as the persona of the band grows richer and more complex, the music follows suit. As varied as Damned to the Depths is in terms of the basic, superficial hearing-of-the-thing, it is unquestionably a single statement (even across the 11 tracks), and for Seedy Jeezus, defines a moment in time that feels lived with and lived through in a way that is genuinely human and all the more resonant for that.
Seedy Jeezus, Damned to the Depths (2025)
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