Rise Ye Sunken Ships [CD]

If there’s any question as to the veracity of his pain, you need only listen to McCarthy’s vocals – throughout these 12 songs (bar final instrumental track, The Instrumental) it sounds like he’s struggling to get the words out, battling against an overwhelming urge to cry and is just about to lose. "I ain’t gonna wait around for some pill to gig in," his voice trembles on the climactic denouement to Headlong Into the Abyss, making clear just how deep that psychological chasm is. Opener Chapel Song details the ache of seeing the girl you still love walking down the aisle with somebody else; Augustine confronts his battle with depression ("Keep your head up, kid / I know you can swim but you gotta move your legs"); Book of James confronts the demons tormenting McCarthy in the wake of his brother’s death ("Just know we tried and you’re forgiven"). That crops up elsewhere, most explicitly on Philadelphia (City of Brotherly Love), Patton State Hospital and Juarez, but, really, his brother’s ghost haunts every facet of these songs, whether they’re directly about him or not.

If that sounds like heavy, difficult listening, it is. These songs tear the flesh from your bones with gentle devastation. But, in their tremulous, spirited delivery and their layered structures – at once sparse and orchestral – they also inspire a sense of hope for the future and a glimmer of redemption. It’s bombastic but it’s broken, anthemic yet withdrawn, extroverted yet timid and uncertain – think Bruce Springsteen at his most emotionally candid and cathartic but channelled through the broken bones of early Arcade Fire – and it serves as a hard-hitting reminder of the strength of the human spirit. "Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact," Springsteen himself told us on Atlantic City, but he countered that depressing fact with an wistful, uncertain wish, that "maybe everything that dies someday comes back." Rise Ye Sunken Ships is the embodiment of that thought – the phoenix rising from the flames, scarred yet triumphant, sad and solemn but alive.

--Mischa Pearlman

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