Tim Seely

What is this?  :  Tim Seely was a noted veteran of the rock scene as the frontman for The Actual Tigers before he ever got around to recording a solo album.  Funeral Music is filled with anthem moments as well as gorgeous, seemingly thrown-off ditties that all weave their own worlds, sensibilities, and subtexts.  The album is a one-off from a man who found his voice and created the perfect platform for it, a la Bon Iver but without much of the self-seriousness.

Why isn’t it on vinyl?  :  Hard to imagine that this isn’t another casualty of a turn-of-the-century gap in vinyl production in a larger sense.  The label affiliated with the release, Slow Love Records, seems to be an entity created just for the purposes of this work, so there isn’t much to compare it to in terms of other releases by the same label.  2005 was still a bit early to take part in a vinyl boom that no one really saw coming yet.

Why should it be?  :  As mentioned above, the production on this album is beyond solid.  The cavernous drums that prevail on “On Film I Play Myself” give a sense of wide open spaces, and the cloistered sonic accoutrements of “The Bees At Nite” offer the simple pleasures of a twilight stroll with a lover.  It brings with it every square-inch of sawdust from the Mississippi studio where it was crafted, largely by Seely himself.  And there is another silly but totally legitimate reason this album deserves a vinyl issue:  its packaging.  The CD came in an old-school file-like package with a string that wrapped around a peg on the opposing side to seal it – such tasteful and delicate detail would lend itself amazingly to an LP cover, if there were a way to pull it off.