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Billy Cobb - Séance
Posted: 3/29/2023 by Micah Seese ( See All) Show:(2021) When it was initially released in March of 2021, Séance was treated as merely a filler project. The SS Krill, Billy Cobb’s gay pirate sea shanty rock opera, was only a few months away from its release. However, the SS Krill had taken Cobb a considerably longer time to create than nearly all of his other projects. To focus his attention on the SS Krill, Cobb decided to leave Séance at only two songs. It made sense, he already had numerous similar projects from his yearly "Halloween" releases. And he felt that the springtime months would be a good source of inspiration for the SS Krill. Thus, Séance was released in a somewhat unfinished state.
All of these factors were seemingly leading to Séance being a lukewarm release. Yet by some miracle, Séance became one of Cobb's best projects, even two years later. Billy Cobb himself sees it as one of his best projects. On hard times news’s podcast "Fanboys,"(A podcast where listeners send in songs by indie artists to be critiqued) upon hearing Séance's opening track for the first time, the hosts regarded it as one of the best songs they had ever heard on the show. When I first heard the song on Bandcamp over two years ago I too was blown away by it.
The single starts with the song Séance. Which starts slow with eerie guitar strumming and understated vocals. Immediately we witness the single's diverse instrumentation with a banjo, adding a feeling of folklore to the song's narrative. The lyrics speak of a desire to gain supernatural powers and cross to the other side of existence. Soon we get harsh guitar feedback, a taste of what's to come. The energy of the instrumentals and the desire of the speaker slowly pick up, before returning to harsh guitar feedback. From here the song really starts to pick up as the speaker is presumably consumed by the dark power he so craves. The vocals transition into screaming as the song crescendos before suddenly stopping. The song ends on a peaceful tune played on a synthesizer, perhaps implying that the speaker succeeded in crossing over to the other side.
The first track of Séance created its horror through an exploration of the super-natural, citing ghosts, witches, the occult, demons, and hell. The second track, “affair” presents a unique contrast to this narrative. It relies on horror just like its predecessor, but uses only the horrors of reality to do so. There is no mention of ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires, demons, monsters, or any entity outside the realm of tangibility. Instead it creates dread using a tangled web of the very real concepts of death, lust, and the inevitable march of time. It creates a situation so real that it has almost certainly been closely replicated before and since its release. It tells the story of a man whose wife is in critical care for an unknown condition, her survival is not likely. After an exhausting day of caring for her, he retreats to a bar. There he meets a woman who makes advances towards him, in such a desperate state the man gives into his desires. He goes to her house and sleeps with her. The narrator of the song makes it clear that this brief recess of pleasure is inescapably temporary. Singing “Run away, for how long?” Before long his wife will die, and his mistress won’t provide him with the long term comfort that she did. His affair will likely bring him nothing but shame, regret, and guilt. His attempt to run away from his problems will likely do nothing but bring him closer to them.
Although Billy Cobb had many similar projects before and after Séance, none of his other works quite match its tone. It exhibits a sense of dread not weighed down or contrasted by a sense of nostalgia or whimsy present in many of Cobb’s other horror works. This is created not only by the narrative of the lyrics, but also by the experimental and varied music itself. Although it is disappointing that Séance was left at two songs, these songs are so perfect that its brevity is arguably a blessing.
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