This is a curious and self consciously eccentric record that is difficult to place and hard to be convinced by.
Listing Ship are from Los Angeles and features founding members Heather Lockie and Lyman Chaffee together with a crew of friends and family.
As the band name and album title suggest, there's a disctinctively nautical flavour to the 15 tunes.
There are songs of whale hunting, love, deception and video games each with an extravagent bookish quality that makes you think they are aiming for the territory mapped out so impressively by The Magnetic Fields. Chaffee's deep bass voice on a quarter of the tracks, whether by accident or design, is even quite similar to Stephin Merritt's.
The songwriting is not in the same league, however. There is craft and talent behind the music but the ship's course is too wayward. While it seems that the band want the album to work as a clever pastiche, it's never clear of what exactly.
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There are shades of Gothic romanticism but then again violins and three part harmonies lend the songs a cheery, happy-go-lucky feel. On 'Depression' a female voice sings dark lines sweetly : "If you won't go I'll have to kill her/I'll leave her bloody corpse for all the rest".
When the mood switches from droll to jaunty, attempts of humour fall flat. The extended double-intendres on 'Coal Hearted Woman, features lascivious lines like "I'd like to sink my shaft into your South Virginia Hills" which come across as crude and heavy handed.
Only the mournful simplicity of Isabella and the all hands to the pump abandon of the closing track (Voice of the Future) suggest that that the band can be something more than a novelty act.
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