Hour of the Shipwreck - The Hour Is Upon Us

Genre experimental Publisher Shipwreck Music & Co. External Links Hour of the Shipwreck MySpace Page Hour of the Shipwreck Website

Hour of the Shipwreck’s new album The Hour is Upon Us is muddled with instruments that add noise but not depth, and is difficult to sit through, with most of its songs lasting from 6 to 8 minutes. The best part of the album is its first 30 seconds. The album seems to get off to a good start with an ethereal, almost eerie, chorus and a Danny Elfman-sort of instrumentation. This euphony ends, however, with the introduction of the dreary, high-pitched vocals. The album never returns to the simply good music of the first 30 seconds of “The Chandelier Suite.”

The second track, “Save the World,” has echoes of Minus the Bear, but that band knows when to cut a song to under a minute, Hour of the Shipwreck keeps the song dragging on ad nauseam. The few lyrics that are discernible seem forced and artificially poignant. Because of this, they often don’t really make sense; in “Save the World,” one of the repeated lines is “The human race with technology / is like an alcoholic / with a barrel of wine.” It would do the band well to leave out the vocals altogether.

In the liner notes, the band cites the sources of their “artistic inspiration” as Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walt Disney and the Imagineers, and Hayao Miyazaki. Despite the fact that it is a little bizarre (and a little lame) for a band to list their influences outright in the CD notes, it does help to explain the overarching film-score sound of the album. From the length of the songs to the myriad instruments (the six members play a variety of instruments ranging from guitars and drums to autoharp, glockenspiel, and air organ), The Hour is Upon Us seems better suited as a soundtrack (albeit a bad one) than anything else. You can almost see the cheesy montage sequence of some teenage soap opera during “My Fantasy,” and the vocals on “Mt. Davidson” make the song sound as if it belongs in some awfully boring musical. If you’re going to list your influences, you should take care to do them justice.

In the last two tracks, the cacophony and boredom only continue. The relatively short (at a still-tiresome 4-and-a-half minutes) “Flying” is difficult to play all the way through, as it sounds like multiple songs playing at once. Whether this is due to poor production or poor composition doesn’t really matter—the song is uninteresting regardless. The last song is titled “Unclouded,” (rather ironically to this critic) and again has that film-score-gone-wrong sound. The last minute or so is nearly unbearable with its jarring, noisy guitar and intermittent, arrhythmic drum beats and cymbal crashes.

The band does get one thing right and that’s the reference to a shipwreck. Like a ship sinking, The Hour is Upon Us is long, slow, and difficult to get through. There’s an impending sense that something has gone terribly wrong, and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.