Seems Twice was an incredible live band by all accounts, and this 1980 Aussie post-punk EP is the only studio recorded testament. 12 songs over 6 1/2 ferocious minutes. You’ll hear the sounds of Saints and These Immortal Souls compressed into miniatures of roaring guitars and brassy assed vocals.Our take: Pass Without Trace Records brings us a reissue of this rare Australian 7” from 1980 on a 45RPM, one-sided 12”. I’d never heard of Seems Twice before this reissue dropped, and I see the EP’s original pressing is up there with some of the other Australian punk classics in terms of price tag and rarity… one of those will set you back several hundred dollars if you can find an opportunity to buy one. After listening to it, I can see why. Seems Twice has a minimalist art-punk sound, their songs very short and primarily fast, but not hardcore. Seems Twice must have taken a lot of influence from the short songs on Wire’s Pink Flag, but since this came out in 1980, it was too early to be influenced by bands like the early Minutemen and the Urinals who were doing something very similar in the US. I find this style magical because if you played short and fast songs at any point after 1981 or so, you would almost certainly be triangulating your sound off of hardcore, either conforming to it or reacting against it. But Seems Twice, like the other bands I mentioned above, sound like a musical version of minimalist visual artists like Frank Stella. Just as those artists dispensed with so many of painting’s extraneous elements to focus on color and pattern, Seems Twice abandon conventional songwriting structures, distilling their music down to these elemental bursts of rhythm and melody. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I highly recommend Non-Plussed… there are only so many examples of this style, and this is a prime one.
