It took me about three seconds of the opening bars of ‘The Light You Stole’, the first track on City of Ships’ third, full length album, the really quite brilliant Ultraluminal (Translation Loss) to know that I had fallen in love with it. In fact, it took just one listen of this record to realise that Ultraluminal had gotten under my skin and was going to stay there like a freshly inked tattoo. City of Ships are positively brimming with intelligence, insight and verve. This is the sort of record that makes you feel a little bit smarter, a bit better about yourself and a lot better about the world.

On the band’s second record, the underground classic of Minor World (Sound Study), their brilliance with atmospherics and textures was matched by a muscularity and power that beguiled and bewitched. On Ultraluminal, the first thing you’re struck by is the brevity of it all. This is a album of distillation: of thought process, of musical dexterity, of creative imagination.

As with many bands where lazy listeners look for an easy and comforting pigeonhole, you could lump City of Ships into that strange hinterland known as post-rock whatever that means. Admittedly, there’s certainly plenty of guitar driven histrionics that anyone with a passing knowledge of Thrice or Quicksand would find to their liking but I think that does them something of a disservice.  On ‘Alarm’, for example, I found myself being swept back to my college shoe-gazing days with all the psychedelic and swooning melodies that conjures in the memory. Equally, the plaintive and emotional vocals of lead singer Eric Jernigan means that you’re vicariously living his pain, joy and ennui as clearly and acutely as he is rather than looking for a convenient label to pin on them. Have a listen to the mournful ‘Lost It’ or the punky and feedback drenched ‘Private Party’ and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about.

There’s a focus and immediacy to the tracks on Ultraluminal that also impresses. Ultraluminal is notable for its punk aesthetic allied to a renewed belief in the power of writing, you know, actual songs. The closing track ‘Mile High’ perhaps being a case in point: it’s a minor chord, melancholic masterpiece. You don’t get alliteration like that everyday, kids.

Ultraluminal is a record that I keep thinking about when it’s not on and keep thinking about when it is on. You know that old, familiar adage about a band being able to do no wrong; on Ultraluminal, you get the idea that the hyperbole might just be justified.

9.0/10

City of Ships on Facebook

MAT DAVIES