Where personalities end and collaboration begins can be a difficult balance for any band, much less a collection of solo artists. Supergroups, after all, don’t get that way without heroic levels of individual ambition. Yet songwriter trio Seeker Lover Keeper’s debut album is as frictionless as a walk on the moon, full of the welcome sounds of mutual appreciation. The set finds Australian musicians Holly Throsby, Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann, each a success story down under, trading harmonies and influences on each other’s songs, an exchange that lends itself to challenged comfort zones.
Seltmann, the sunny-voiced co-writer of Feist’s “1234,” finds herself atop a rare bed of speaker-sizzling guitars in “Every Time,” while it’s her bouncing piano chords that underpin Throsby’s wounded take on introspective pop number “Even Though I’m a Woman”—a track that credits distance itself, not an absent lover, with kindling romantic longing. Elsewhere, Blasko’s rough-throated lead on “Light All My Lights” gives edge to what could’ve been a folk lullaby. The 12 tracks touch on head-in-the-clouds synth-pop, earthier guitar folk, and ’70s-influenced singer-songwriter material alike, but the trio’s tightly knit harmonies keep the aesthetic from blurring too far out of focus.
The group’s nearest precedent might be 1987’s Trio, the album that gathered Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris for a similarly amiable fireside chat. Seeker Lover Keeper, too, gathers charismatic women seemingly in no need of assistance—only to find that three can be more than a crowd.