Guitarist/composer
Shane Parish came onto many listeners' radar with his 2016 album Undertaker Please Drive Slow, a set of acoustic tunes in the American Primitive/Guitar Soli tradition but with a sense of minimalism and abstraction specific to
Parish. While he excels at that style, his range is far from limited to rustic acoustic fingerpicking. He's collaborated with a host of boundary-pushing improvisers, and his solo sounds can land anywhere from placid reflections to noisy confusion.
Liverpool highlights yet another side of
Parish's playing, as he takes inspiration for these nine tracks from nautical work songs and sea shanties, but bends their ageless melodies into new, strange forms. Along with percussionist
Michael Libramento,
Parish uses layered electric guitars that manifest as everything from textural ambience to searing leads. Opening track "Liuerpul" begins with a storm of formless dissonance before slowly blooming into a steady, foreboding groove. Haunted reverb and other processing create an atmospheric mist that surrounds the song's main melodies. It's a queasy, shifting track that bears some similarities to '90s post-rockers like
June of 44 or
Aerial M, yet has a distinctive sea-faring bluster and darkness to it. "Black Eyed Susan" coveys a similar swaying uneasiness, with a steady metronome-like scrape of guitar strings keeping time for multiple eerie fingerpicked patterns and leads. The tune builds slowly for over six minutes without ever cresting dynamically, but just hovering like a storm at sea. Though a certifiable virtuoso,
Parish's playing throughout
Liverpool is restrained to the point of sometimes feeling almost subtractive. The overdriven skitter of "Randy Dandy O" feels like it should erupt into either a swashbuckling full-band arrangement or some showy display of technical abilities, but instead it wanders at an unhurried pace and keeps to a ragged, skeletal song structure. Throughout the album,
Parish experiments with droning E-Bow distortion, the grumbling rumble of downtuned strings, tremolo- and reverb-soaked tones, odd time signatures, and slowly gathering arrangements like that of album standout "Haul Away Joe," a tangle of fuzzy intertwining melodies and free drumming that intensifies so slowly that the song's building clamor seems to appear out of nowhere. With its subtle compositional choices and unlikely palette of guitar sounds,
Liverpool finds
Parish capturing the menace and the vastness of open water while showing a new depth of his artistry. ~ Fred Thomas