Exclusive Track Premiere: Ghosts of Sailors at Sea’s “Harry McNish”

This past July, the editors of MetalSucks hand-picked ten unsigned bands from an open application process to record at Converse Rubber Tracks — Converse’s completely free, state-of-the-art recording studio — in either Brooklyn, NY with producer Will Putney (The Acacia Strain, Suicide Silence, Exhumed), or Boston, MA, with producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High on Fire, Torche). In the weeks leading up to the recording sessions, we previewed each band, and in the coming weeks we’ll be premiering the finished tracks from all ten! Today, we feature Ghosts of Sailors at Sea from Boston.

One of the advantages of being an instrumental band is that the “meaning” of your music is far more open to interpretation without lyrics to influence the listener. And one of the advantages of being in a great instrumental band like Ghosts of Sailors at Sea is that your music is really open to a multitude of interpretations. Is “Harry McNish,” the song the quartet recorded at CRT Boston with Kurt Ballou, upbeat or downtrodden? Thick as concrete or wispy as a dream? A simple melody guaranteed to get stuck in your head, or a complex prog symphony? Having listened to the song a half a dozen times in the past week while in different moods, I can tell you that “Harry McNish” is, in fact, all of these things at once. It’s a Frank Stella painting, a Haruki Murakami novel, a Maya Deren film — an artistic Rorschach test that will teach as much as about your own current state of mind as it will the intentions of the artist. Listen to the song multiple times, and only one element of your experience will remain consistent: that’s it a great goddamn song.