Shipping News
One Less Heartless to Fear
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Karate Body
If you were familiar with Louisville, Kentucky rockers Shipping News before clicking a link to this review, well, you’ve got one on me. The veteran (forgive the terrible yet effectively illustrative term) math rockers have their origins in none other than a collaboration between guitarists Jason Noble and Jeff Mueller, originally of Rodan, on incidental music for NPR’s “This American Life.” Drummer Kyle Crabtree and bassist Todd Cook (Parlour, The For Carnation) round out the rhythm section and 14 years on, the Annie Proulx-referencing Shipping News are releasing their first full-length, One Less Heartless to Fear, since Flies the Fields (2005). Coincidentally, One Less pulls that old, interesting Neil Young trick; the record introduces seven new songs (and two oldies) in live incarnations, establishing the tunes as vital and virile, not letting production get in the way of the notion that Shipping News is a band.
Taken from the recordings of a date in Louisville’s Skull Alley and Tokyo’s O-Nest, One Less opens with the churning “Antebellum,” which establishes the record’s template; Crabtree pounds out the kind of unorthodox time signature that makes the kind of guys who think Neil Peart is God drool, Cook fills in the space with gnarled bass and Noble and Mueller reflect one another’s shards of distortion, when not strangling their guitar necks with high-strung, highly reverberating, almost violin-like explorations. Amidst this raging storm, Mueller doesn’t sing so much as dourly, though frantically, rants like a street corner preacher. “Are you ready for the Show-Me State, ” he implores, before enticing the listeners with both “root beer Tuesday” and “hot fudge Thursday,” though these occasions hardly sound joyous.
Elsewhere on One Less, Shipping News storm through the sweaty “7s” with Cook’s bassline jagged like a buzzsaw and the band letting loose in a fashion similar to the twisty-turny metal featured on Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. “Half a House” further illustrates the band’s lyrical bent; Mueller mumbles about “big boxed-telemarkets and hybrid pyramid schemes/ All us yellow-bellied cankers…put away your mason jars and slaughterhouse pickets,” using images and terminology indebted to consumerist culture – not so much as statements of critique but, instead, as a kind of unsettling verbal collage.
“Axons & Dendrites,” the first of two revisited songs from Flies the Fields, is the kind of heavy instrumental that is at once thunderously loud and comfortably enveloping in its slow, steady ebb. The second, “(Morays or) Demon” is the record’s only real misfire; to me, it sounds in danger of having the four instrumentalists suddenly veer off in different directions, playing different songs – not in a good way, though I never thought I’d hear a sentence like, “The fax machine is covered in a grayish-green blanket” shouted with such conviction and I think there’s something to be said for that.
I’m not sure whom the audience is for that vague lumping-together of rhythmically astute, frenetically distorted guitarists called (here I go again) math rock, but I can promise that One Less Heartless to Fear is the kind of heavy rock record that could surprise dudes who’ve long thought they’d outgrown their Soundgarden and Voivod records. The truth told by Shipping News is you never outgrow it, so enjoy. For those of us just joining the preceding programming, we just may find ourselves checking out Slint records in no time.
by Chris Middleman
Key Tracks: Antebellum, Axons & Dendrites
