Mike Seed?s homemade cd-r is a proper album but is presented more as a loosely connected assortment of mini-songs. All 18 of them sound nearly finished, and from the first track on, each one is quickly and abruptly interrupted by the next. Seed is feeling out his potential songwriting approach on these recordings, and unfortunately this leaves them sounding underdeveloped and missing the strong voice needed to hold up such rough sketches of song. He surrounds most of the record with a dark ambience, but rather than help shade or color the music, the drone simply fills up space. The hushed third track ?Sleep in My Melody? takes after British folk, but Seed never creates the tension between the lulling and the terrifying that enables songs in this tradition to be striking. Other moments on ?A Boy? bring out a junkyard-built musical quality, with Seed using rusty guitar strings for atmosphere and recycling warped jazz tapes to create a fuzzy, looping effect. Yet altogether, the vague themes of darkness and solitude that Seed explores musically and lyrically on this release seem forced and unnatural. 5/10 -- Ivan Mairesse (18 July, 2005)