Review Summary: It got so bad... But here I can make it. I can teach myself to survive.
Who are City Of Ships...
...I have no idea, really.
I’d never heard any of their work before late 2015 when I stumbled upon this album and it had had an uncanny sort of impact on me. As 2015 was a hectic and confusing year, this album got lost in the shuffle. In fact, I completely forgot it even existed. Except every now and then, some melody or snippet of lyric would wander back into my brain at random and vex me for hours as I would fumble with Google, trying to articulate certain phrases that kept coming back to me, searching for this album again to no avail...
Until finally this year, after a protracted period of proverbially checking the oven for that pair of keys I had hopelessly misplaced… After I had finally given up… it finally hit me like a lightning bolt of epiphany: City Of Ships. Ultraluminal.
To describe this album in broad terms is to do it a disservice. I guess it’s a punky, post-hardcore/alt rock album with terrible production and layers of washed out guitars that crash over you like a waterfall on jagged rocks. But even that loose description is like trying to hold a cup of water in your hands; the heart of it just leaks right through your fingers.
Alarm hooks fast and hard with aching sing-song vocals that cascade over a wall of dissonant guitars and throbbing bass. It alternates between lost and directionless verses and a flailing bleeding-heart chorus that implodes like a star under its own reverb-soaked waves. Metadata Blues rocks hard as well but the vocals sound tired and defeated as the singer mumbles ‘these days, you know you can’t be too careful… I trust they had their reasons… as long as I get left alone’.
Private Party is another winner, a reckless, punch-drunk celebration of personal failings framed in dirty rock: ‘Walked into a trap that I thought was my way out!’ The singer shouts carelessly in an eerie mixture of bitterness and pride, ‘Been caught in it for so long… don’t think I’ll shake it now’.
The Old Man really flaunts the Finch influence with it’s aggressive border-line screamed lyrics and by-turn dirty-bright guitars, while Lost It and Mile High really mine the wall-of-noise approach to come up with something almost tender in its nostalgia, appropriately tinged with regret and painful self-awareness. These two tracks are so poignant that I’m going to go ahead and post the lyrics down below because they are true gems that go hand-in-hand and immaculately encapsulate the album; One is about being a haunted by a death, while the other tells the story of a man who goes off to live as a hermit out of spite to those who assumed he would die.
But the absolute heart of the record has to be Preeminence. It’s a hard, hook-laden alt-rock song in the vein of Finch, and that chorus has been ringing in my head for years, even as I tore my hair out to figure out where it came from or if I merely dreamed it… That hook really crystallizes the essence of what’s special and unique about Ultralumial: ‘You can take an illiterate man and teach him how to read, but you can’t force the meaning… Stand next to a blind man and describe the scenery, but it won’t help him to see’.
I could go on, but in fear of redundancy, Ultraluminal is a unique cocktail of angsty emotions; even as it’s trying to pull you into its whirlpool of woe-is-me-ness, it’s also deliberately holding you at arms-length, never willing to fully be embraced. And when the execution is this strong, that kind of bipolarity is a blessing rather than a curse.
