Search - Shipwreck :: Origin

When we last left our heroes, the culmination of their influences was battling for precedence in the band's grand musical scheme. Their Shipwreck E.P. stood strong if not scatterbrained. The E.P. built promise, foundation, and boasted what are still some of the band's best songs. Now, with the band's first full-length, Origin, we find Shipwreck gentrifying its members' influences, effectively fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. The product of three intense months of songwriting in late 2004, Origin was produced by Jordan Schultz and the band at North Branch Studios in Chicago in January 2005. The resulting album is one of Pavement-esque non-chalance, of complicated chord structures and tonal dexterity reminiscent of Radiohead, and ultimately, of unequivocal personal vision. Yet still Shipwreck's sound remains perhaps most reminiscent of a desolate Midwest, with words full of tales that could have happened anywhere but here (making the band's name all the more apropos). On Origin we find a record of modernity-instead of vast oceans there are vast corn fields, but there are ghosts in these stories just the same: the ghosts of dreams passed, loves lost, of skeletons removed from closets. --Zack Adcock