Seamonsters by Wedding Present

Seamonsters, the Wedding Present's third album, came out on RCA in 1991, and it's the Leeds band trading jangle for a bruising. Steve Albini, who had already roughed them up on the Brassneck and 3 Songs EPs, recorded it in ten days at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and the result sounds nothing like the frantic strum of the first two albums: guitars grind and swell, the quiet stretches simmer, and the loud ones hit like a slammed door.

David Gedge, the band's one constant, also ditched the long, chatty song titles the music press liked to poke fun at; every track here gets a single word, from "Dalliance" to "Octopussy". Critics loved it. Not everyone survived it, though: guitarist Peter Solowka was fired between the sessions and the release, with Paul Dorrington stepping in.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.