City Of Ships At Vacation Vinyl, Tuesday July 24th 2012
I arrived at Vacation Vinyl just when City of Ships had just started their in-store on Tuesday night, and their loud and thick sound was totally audible from the sidewalk, even with the door closed. When I entered the store, the atmosphere was dark and heavy, and even though I immediately reached for my earplugs, I could hear melodies floating above the extreme loudness and distortion.
They were only three with a classic guitar-bass-drums, but they managed to deliver some dark and compact music, with, as I have already mentioned, spacey melodic lines. The shouted and raucous vocals were cutting the haze of the tempestuous guitar-bass, and the result was not that head-banging, rather mechanical. Was it mathcore, post-metal, progressive, experimental? It sounded very speedy-technical at times, but again there were the melodies, almost passionate and carrying a real sadness supported by the gritty vocals.
Before a song, guitarist and vocalist Eric Jernigan said he wanted to dedicate it to Dirty Greg (may be I got the name wrong), a guy they had met in jail after having been falsely accused by the police to have stolen a van, when they were furniture movers in New York. This guy seems to be quite a character to have inspired a song,.. by the way he was a Nirvana fan and told them in jail that Courtney Love had killed Kurt Cobain with her own hands.
During their set, they announced they were about to go on tour in Australia immediately after the show, and they didn’t play much longer after this,… with just a few songs, it was hard for me to describe what I had just heard, and on their facebook page, they have written ‘good luck’ to describe their genre. It is funny, but they seemed to effortless mix different things, from metal to hardcore to noise rock, with technical edges and contrasts, leaving me in a sort of desolation-isolation state of mind, if it wasn’t for this ‘funny’ jail story.
‘Minor World’ is their last album, released last year and you can listen to some of their music here.
