Band: Silverstein
Album: A Shipwreck in the Sand
Label: Victory Records
Length: 45:15
Rating: 3/5
By: Stuart Paterson
Date: May 25, 2009

In an over-crowded genre such as post-hardcore, it’s often hard to tell the players without a program. It’s impossible to condemn the style for sounding too same-ish, since, you could argue, don’t all bands in all genres by their very nature sound somewhat alike? But groups who make an effort to re-package those familiar chords, even in subtle ways, usually win a great deal of admiration.

On their fourth full length album, A Shipwreck In The Sand, Silverstein has, unfortunately, aimed high but missed the mark.

First of all, a brief digression into genre-labelling is warranted. Silverstein apparently prefer to be called post-hardcore, a desire which they could justify in all sorts of ways, but to the uninitiated they have produced a screamo record through and through. Yes, it swings in mood from delicate melody to harsh, almost metal-like hardcore, but it always hovers around that middle ground where the “emo” chords lie. You listen to these songs and think, “My God… I’ve heard this before.” Indeed you have, for many years now, and it begs the question: when will this genre finally evolve?

A Shipwreck In The Sand had the promise of taking the genre to new heights. It’s a highly ambitious concept album -- the first in Silverstein’s discography -- but therein lies the problem: the story is too complex to be boiled down into fourteen tracks with a total running time of just 45 minutes. Maybe if it had been a 70-minute progressive rock opera, the story would have been given enough chance to breathe, but even that sounds too restrictive. If it were a two-hour-long experimental art movie, then perhaps all the angles could be explored to the satisfaction of the audience. Make no mistake, though, the story is interesting, if a bit convoluted.

Essentially, they’re attempting to juxtapose the themes of two parallel stories. The first, after which the album is named, is the mutiny of a crew of sailors aboard an exploratory ship, sailing in uncharted waters, with a mission of finding clean new land in the wake of vast pollution in already-populated areas. The second is the slow destruction of a family whose house burns down, and are forced to move into a hotel while they are dicked around by their crooked insurance agency.

The official album website (www.ashipwreckinthesand.com) lists “Betrayal. Arson. Infidelity. True Love” as major themes, and that’s completely accurate. It’s how the band (or, more importantly, lyricist Shane Told) mismanages the material that causes the album to falter.

Thankfully, the lyrics themselves are not too contrived, but because of the aforementioned musical constraints, and perhaps the band’s unwillingness to write longer songs, the story gets chopped up into chapters with a non-linear chronology. That works very well in a Quentin Tarantino flick, but it becomes downright confusing in the context of a rock album. Add to that the fact that the subplot about the mutiny gets exactly one song to evolve, at the beginning of Chapter Three, and the whole point about presenting these two narratives side by side goes right out the window.

But it is a rock album, after all, so half the fun is listening to the music. With that comes the other major problem: the music conforms so well to the genre that fans of it will rejoice, but casual listeners will likely be groaning by the end because there simply isn’t enough progression here.

Silverstein gets major kudos for including subtle elements not often heard in these sorts of songs, and also for attempting to wildly vary the pace of the album. They move effortlessly from breakneck hardcore punk to soft, heartfelt pseudo-ballads, and vice versa, but at the core, there is little in the way of total evolution by the end of the album.

One of the few bright, boundary-pushing songs is the aforementioned lone piece devoted to the mutiny, which also happens to be the album’s title track, as the band experiments with spoken word narration and some pretty innovative musical textures. Here, they certainly live up to their desired post-hardcore label, but the success is short-lived, as the rousing chant at the end of track transitions abruptly into “I Am The Arsonist,” which takes us back to the homeless family and abandons the newfound innovations in favour of some kick-ass hardcore.

But more kudos are garnered by the common sense they display in having all the songs within the four chapters segue seamlessly into one another, all the while keeping the chapters themselves separated by brief silences. It’s exactly what you would expect, and if they had approached it any other way. it would have ruined the flow of the album.

Another interesting touch is the use of guest vocalists Liam Cormier (Cancer Bats), Scott Wade (ex-Comeback Kid), thrash-punk band I Am Committing A Sin and, most notably, Juno-winner Lights. Her contribution to “The End” as the character of the wife singing a duet with Told, is one of the highlights of the album. The song’s seven-minute length and progressive structure hint at a direction the band could have taken as a means of both exploring the story more thoroughly and elevating their music to new heights, but, unfortunately, the opportunity passed them by.

However, that isn’t to suggest that the album is devoid of good songs. On the contrary, “A Great Fire,” “Vices,” “A Shipwreck In The Sand,” “I Am The Arsonist,” and the tritely-titled “The End” are all stand-outs in their own right, but the rest of the songs exist in a grey area, caught between mediocrity and invention, where promising intros give way to predictable riffs, chords and vocal melodies. Frequent tempo and time signature changes serve only as red herrings to distract from the underlying similarities between songs and, ultimately, the seemingly timeless formula of alternating screaming and singing that pervades the aptly-named screamo style.

But Silverstein fans will likely adore this album for its twisting plot, tight musical performances and certainly for the hard work that went into creating it. Cameron Webb, by the way, does an exceptional job in his duties as producer, engineer and mixer, as the heavy overall tone of the album is one of its high points.

That said, all other fans of alternative rock, post-hardcore, screamo, emo or any other label you want to apply here should still check it out. It’s not a bad record, it just has too many flaws to make it great. For some, those flaws might be easy to overlook and a post-hardcore gem will emerge. For others, this ambitious concept album will feel mired by its own aspirations.