Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Seaforth, Sony Music Nashville 2019.
Seaforth is an acoustic Australian duo who hail from the Sydney northern harbour suburb of Seaforth and who have taken the big step of relocating to Nashville.
The band consists of singer/songwriters Tom Jordan and Mitch Thompson who have known each other for more than 20 years. They’ve grown up playing soccer together and sharing school classes and a similar taste in music.
They each independently entered the music business before officially hooking up as a duo when they attended a songwriting course in Nashville.
There in the same city that transformed one of their musical heroes, Keith Urban into a global phenomenon, they decided to embark on a project that would highlight their songwriting skills as well as their natural harmonies.
They credit their musical influences as being as broad as Keith Urban all the way to The Beatles, however harmony plays the major part in their music.
The boys have that magical quality of possessing a natural harmony.
At times they sound like Simon & Garfunkel and at other times the Everly Brothers or Lennon and McCartney.
In each case these duos have the good fortune to have a natural harmony to their voices.
“We both complement each other in this band,” says Thompson.
‘We have the kind of partnership where we both have our own personas and we meet in the middle. The ship wouldn’t sail without both of us.”
Seaforth have signed a worldwide deal with Sony Nashville and they are gaining the benefit of the incredible stable of artists and producers that label has at its disposal.
They’ve attracted the attention of Dann Huff, an award-winning producer and multi-instrumentalist whose credits just happen to include Keith Urban.
Huff co-produced several of the EP’s tracks around the band’s demos, leaving parts of Seaforth’s homemade recordings intact.
It’s an interesting technique that says a lot about the quality of the boys’ work.
This EP is their debut and I feel that we’ll be hearing a lot more from Seaforth in the future.
