Hotel Hotel - The Sad Sea

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Brian on Thu 06 Nov, 2008.

'The Sad Sea' is apparently an audio document charting an abortive mission to discover the whereabouts of the "real" Marie Celeste. It's a sweetly packaged CD (all poshly letterpressed) by Hotel Hotel, a Texan "post-rock" band who have quite a colourful biography, what with absconding drummers and eccentric sea-faring chums. The music is quite delicate and lonesome from the beginning, suggesting still, deep murky water & nautical abandonment. Atmospheric drifting with ghostly, meandering guitar yawns and occasional slight percussion. By half way, you're totally lulled into the graceful, yearning pace of it all, a tentative journey embellished with haunting, beautiful viola that has me welling up inside, feeling the solitude of it all. Then the big music lands, Dramatic drums crash into your concioussness whilst all manner of effects laden guitars tell a story of powerful waves & dangerous hallucinations, an attack by a stealthy Leviathan perhaps? Then all is calm again and we sink back into the sonorous neo-orchestral beauty, sad, evocative & beautiful. There's more drama ahead but I've got to admit this is one of the freshest & most atmospheric albums of this genre I've had the pleasure to check in a long while. If you're a fan of all the obvious players, this more than stands up tall alongside.

“...a moody conglomerate of emotions embodied by lurid drones and pensive stillness, swirls of
sonic texture and eerie atmospherics, and entrancing, disorienting repetition interrupted by
robust, vibrant crescendos.” ~ Jacob Price, Delusions of Adequacy
The Sad Sea is the long-awaited new album from the Texas post-rock band:
Hotel Hotel. P. D. Wilder & Patrick Patterson were already playing together
in CAN(d/t)A when they met a wild-eyed intense young drummer while out
on tour back in 2005. Soon they found themselves recording what would
become Hotel Hotel's first album allheroesareforeverbold. The new group
took to the road & began touring the USA & the UK extensively, securing
a contract with Silber Records. In spring 2007 the drummer, the real force
& mastermind behind the formation of the band, disappeared at LaGuardia
Airport on April 11, 2007; not having been seen since. Just when things were starting to roll along it all
came to a halt. There would be year long derailment before the band could be rebuilt..
So the remains of the band were sitting in Austin on an unusually cold night, drinking in an out of the
way dive bar wondering what to do about the band, about drummers, & about life in general when a guy
turns to them in full sea captain attire, beard & all, the spitting image of Zach Galifianakis, & proceeds
to tell them about an expedition he’d been working on for years to find the ghost ship the “Marie Celeste,”
admitting that the 2001 find wasn’t the real thing & that they should sign up for all the adventure &
glory to be had. The Sad Sea is the tale of this fateful voyage from Galveston, Texas to the coast of
Haiti during the thick of hurricane season. A tale of madness & hope, of love & loss, of despair &
regret, of post rock & indie ambient.
The Sad Sea engulfs you like the ocean during a brutal storm. You can smell the salt water, for it
almost suffocates you. The distress you feel is real, a sinking ship in the middle of nowhere after being
out to sea for days upon endless days mounting into such longing…through dusk laid to rest by the
settling fog & drifting across the ocean; a motionless body of crystal & glass frozen. The compass is
broken. The sea swallows any wanting. Lay down in the sea & home is where you will be.