Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves: "Canyons"

Imagine the following situation: you went out last night, talked to some old friends, got a little too drunk and a little too nostalgic. You said some stupid things that pissed off your girlfriend and wake up the next day with a mixture of residual nostalgia and regret but also that elated feeling of knowing that you had an absolute blast last night. It’s too early to get up but the sun’s out and you have the day off. You step outside to take a walk and let the morning breeze clear your mind. You’ll meet your friends later. Life is good. 

Listen to “Never have time” on Canyons – and you’ll have the perfect soundtrack. The music, the lyrics, and Chris Wollard’s voice all carry the mixture of melancholia, regret, and optimism that comes with days like the one above. It’s what I like about his songs in Hot Water Music (his main band in which he shares singing and songwriting duties with Chuck Ragan) and it’s what shines through in the best songs on Canyons.

Initially, I was turned off by the same thing that turned me off of some Chris’s songs on Exister, Hot Water Music’s most recent album: “Poison Friends” and “Sick sick love” – like “Boy, you’re gonna hurt someone” on Exister – are kind of repetitive both lyrically and musically. Especially “Sick sick love” feels like it started off as a jam during practice sessions and ended up with some last-minute vocals to put it on the album. Once you make it past these setbacks, though, you’ll find an album that sounds more like band effort than their previous CD (which was, I guess, more or less a solo album) and that is distinctly different not only from Hot Water Music but also from the many many punkrocker-gone-acoustic releases that pop up everywhere.

While there are some melodies that are recycled from Hot Water Music (“Heavy Rolling Thunder,” for example, sounds a lot like “Seein’ Diamonds”) and some typical Chris-Wollard-chord-sequences, this is all in all quite different from HWM. Whereas HWM have always been progressive in their sound and approach, the Ship Thieves are retrospective. You’ll hear a little bit of Neil Young, some Dylan, and many other influences. Their music is nothing new, but that’s exactly the point. Compared to Hot Water Music, they are more of a bar band – with more room for solos and jamming, here to rock while you have a good time and a couple of beers.  The opener, “Dream in my head,” for example, is the kind of Southern punk’n’roll you’d hear at, well, Egan’s in Tuscaloosa, AL on a Friday night.

I am glad that he is neither over-countrifying his songs or going down the acoustic path that Chuck Ragan and countless others have followed. There is only one dude-with-an-acoustic-guitar song on Canyons:  “Lonely Days,” which starts with handclaps and turns into a raspy-voiced melancholy folk song that could also appear on Ben Nichols’s “The Last Pale Light in the West” EP. Actually, forget what I just said: I wouldn’t mind a whole Chris Wollard acoustic album if the songs are that good. Two other standout tracks for me are the two album closers, “Never have time” and “Modern Faith”: they are not really HWM material and might otherwise have gone unpublished, so I am really glad that Chris Wollard found an additional outlet with the Ship Thieves. Although it suffers from a couple of somewhat unexciting songs, Canyons shows Chris Wollard’s knack for writing unpretentious and honest songs that are melancholy and uplifting at the same time: songs about regret, about getting lost, about not finding the time to do what we really want – but at the same time about the redeeming power of love and friendship.


Chris Wollard and the Ship Thieves on Facebook
Chris Wollard on No Idea Records