City Of Ships - Live Free Or Don't Tour

City Of Ships
Live Free Or Don’t Tour
Force­field; 2009

Even though I can bur­row deep into my brain and uncover more than a few exam­ples of what is com­monly referred to as “hard rock,” I’m not sure that musi­col­o­gists can place an exact def­i­n­i­tion upon the genre. Some­where past the preter­nat­ural bom­bast of rock-​and-​roll and some­where before we fall head­long into the pum­mel­ing riffs and anger of metal exists hard rock; yet, instead of stak­ing any cer­tain claim, bands have danced back and forth between the two for nearly forty years now. If you fac­tor in the advent of hard­core in the ‘80s and the rise of post-​hardcore in this decade, we now have a third sur­face upon which bands can bounce when seek­ing to cre­ate “hard rock.”

This is the very atti­tude that per­me­ates both halves of Live Free Or Don’t Tour, the new split 12” record from City Of Ships, as the band’s Live Free Or Don’t EP meets with its 2008 Tour EP, both capa­bly con­vey­ing the band’s energy and per­for­mance chops. What makes the project suc­ceed is that this sim­ple three-​piece has a huge sound: intensely emo­tive hardcore-​styled vocals are com­bined with heavy metal qual­ity low-​end riffage from both gui­tar and bass to cre­ate a very head-​bangable expe­ri­ence. In that sense, City Of Ships faith­fully exe­cutes a clas­sic, almost genre-​less ver­sion on hard rock that fans of Tool, A Per­fect Cir­cle, and Hum will most cer­tainly enjoy. Fur­ther­more, Live Free Or Die is musi­cally far supe­rior to the Tour EP – the pro­duc­tion is crisper (but not too clean), the rhythm sec­tion heav­ier, the gui­tars are sharper, the song struc­ture more dis­tinct, and the brood­ing atmos­phere cre­ated is more pronounced.

My con­cern here is that I find the music to be some­what for­mu­laic and plod­ding at times. In my per­sonal esti­ma­tion, it seems the band exists in the musi­cal nether­world between those three pri­mary tex­tures, and sub­se­quently lacks a spe­cific direc­tion for where it’s head­ing in the future. To the band’s credit, these three men appear to be will­fully and pur­pose­fully eschew­ing the con­cept of “genre” and are more than happy to keep rock­ing. City Of Ships might not break any new ground with its sound, nor pro­vide the music world any clar­ity regard­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of “hard rock,” but such dal­liances from this critic are not going to stop this band from con­tin­u­ing to make the best rock music it knows how.