The soft & sincere sonic vision of Seagazer

Afternoons in the park with Seagazer’s Alex Rigsbee; photographed by Cooper Martin.

Quietly released at the end of last November — obscure home-brewed act Seagazer, the brainchild of Indianapolis artist Alex Rigsbee, hunkered down into a basement and created the sweet and sentimental album Gentle Eyes via Just For You. Rigsbee shares a cycle of twee sewn odes to jangle pop tinged amour, experiences and earnest observations honed in the key of life. The 10 song album is an exercise in understated emeralds of warmth and endearment that embraces the ebbs and flows of life's tides in a cocktail blend of ennui and ecstasy alike.

Gentle Eyes brings in a whole lotta heart with the lead track “Turn of Shades" that feels like the transformation of the solstices and the inner reflections that arrive with those new seasons. Introspection abounds with the reflective "Gone Soon", surveys of feelings and thoughts on hard luck and the like with "Bad Karma Kid", to the psych-imbued cycles of time on "Night and Day". Seagazer celebrates the moments that bring thought and meaning with tracks like "Savor It", the intimate and understated intonations of perception with “Arise”, to deep pensive dives into the life-death continuum on "Birth Pangs", as homeward bound meditations and complications ring out with "Home-Rule", shaking the thought stream of the unconscious with the shambles stew of "In Our Nature", before closing the record with the wistful, departing note "Just Like Before". Alex Rigsbee's latest pop offering entertains the pangs of nostalgia, exploring the interior of sentimental thought processes of longing, desire and all that we hope our collective world could (and can) be.

Picnic snack sessions with Seagazer’s Alex Rigsbee; photographed by Cooper Martin.

Alex Rigsbee provided some succinct insights on the creation of the new Seagazer album:

I was in Minnesota while recording most of the album. I played around with some friends that I met through work and we jammed to some of the songs. It was a good time. The album started with the song “Gone Soon”. I wrote and recorded it on a whim because I was feeling really good and confident at the time, late 2019. I wanted to express how I felt in music form. Almost everything else on the album came afterwards. The following couple months was a creative time for me. Whenever I felt like making music, I just went for it.

From left; Austin & Alex in the basement recording the new Seagazer album; photographed courtesy of Austin Hogan.

Some of my creative ideas for songs came from a headspace I was in where I wasn’t focused directly on the music, but rather was doing some mindless activity while peripherally thinking about it. Like for “Bad Karma Kid”, I thought of the main riff of the song while I was half asleep in my room staring at a bass fretboard. I also came up with the chord progression for the chorus of “Gone Soon” in my head while going to the bathroom, which is just a really mundane thing to be doing. But the ideas worked nonetheless.

Basement prayers with Seagaze; photographed by Austin Hogan.

I spent many months after this creative streak editing and fine-tuning the album. I wanted it to be as good as it could be before it was released. It was pretty hard to know when to stop and just finish the thing, honestly. The end of 2020 was a good point to let it go.

All in all I’m pretty happy with the way Gentle Eyes turned out, and very thankful to Just For You Records for releasing and promoting it. I’m looking forward to another possible effort in the foreseeable future.

Seagazer’s Gentle Eyes is available now via Just For You Records.