Seal Seal
We've waited five years for the follow up to 1998's lacklustre Human Being and it was generally believed that 40-year-old Sealhenry Samuel was going through some sort of mid-life crisis, at the very least a loss of musical direction.
Well, forget it. This is as good as you'll hear from the man who stunned with the multi-million selling eponymous debut in 1991.
To give you some idea just how bad things got, consider that Human Being sold just 490,000 copies. Seal IV, by contrast, entered the Billboard 200 at number three. And it's an impressive work with a tale to tell.
Seal actually made the album twice, producing the first effort himself before moving from Los Angeles to London to start over with veteran producer Trevor Horn (responsible for his first album and the gated reverb sound on those groundbreaking Yes tracks of the late 1970s and early 80s). The first apparently 'lacked emotion'.
You won't find a Kiss From A Rose here, but My Vision comes close with its haunting mix of laid-back sparse piano and intimate vocals. The Ray Charles-esque Don't Make Me Wait is sweet, as is the highly personal Loneliest Star and gentle Tinsel Town.
If you want to hear why Seal chose to stick with Horn, close the curtains, dim the lights and turn up the volume on Love Divine; here's a guy who's got a heavier hand with the reverb than a Lamma Island barmaid has with a gin bottle. Make mine a double.
Seal Seal
IV
(Warner)
