Chris Brokaw: Ghost Ship

From the country echoes of Incredible Love (2005) to wandering grunge Gambler’s Ecstasy (2012) and the marauding beast that is Puritan (2021), Chris Brokaw has spent a solo career dispensing songs tailor-made for television scores. Fitting, considering Brokaw is well versed on that front, too, having scored nine films (his most recent, Julia Halperin and Jason Cortlund’s Crookedfinger).

It’s one of the many beguiling facets throughout the Boston-based songwriter’s tenure. His name, etched in underground folklore with slowcore legends, Codeine, and post-hardcore giants, Come – endeavours which have overshaded his excellent solo canon and his many other projects, led by the excellent The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries and Lupa Citta.

Brokaw is a disciple of the past. His songs, steeped in Neil Young reverence and the sombre undercurrents of Alex Chilton, and on Brokaw’s latest release, Ghost Ship, he hasn’t written something more enveloped in gloom. Said to be a landscape meditation (at sea), in truth the songs on Ghost Ship feel a lot closer to home, likened to someone navigating through the war zone of bereavement. These songs, hitting with a raw emotional force that shatters the heart.

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Written on a ’60s Teisco Del Rey electric guitar with an .80 gauge low E string tuned down to a low A, it’s this tuning that adds more weight of despair to these songs, which sound like nothing else in Brokaw’s discography. Brokaw described these songs as written “quickly in a kind of fever”, and you can feel it. Again, in the ire of loss, those left behind are being pushed and pulled in a daze with little concern for anything (including themselves), and it’s this feeling that gives these songs a deeper sense of reality.

On Over My Body, Brokaw’s guitar is like a knife scraping across a glacier. “I won’t leave you crying over my body,” sings Brokaw, his voice as fragile as glass, sounding scared and sleep-deprived through crippling sadness.

The title track, one of two interludes (the other, Vampire of Rathmines), where soft guitar textures roll across the same seas that adorn Ghost Ship’s cover. Such as the weight of these songs, it’s these moments that provide relief, adding a meditative layer and a sense of calm.

Which evaporates on Anything Anymore. All bluster and stiff upper lip, in all its gnarled metallic glory, Brokaw channels his inner-Lou Reed (“I don’t thank God for anything anymore/ I’ve got a disease / And now it’s a breeze”). Equal parts outlier and outlaw, sonically it rips and tears with frightening vigour.

Palatine Light also possesses a rip and tear quality, but at the other end of the spectrum. With a similar intensity to Matt Christensen’s latest works, a beautiful guitar line weeps through the speakers, as Brokaw uses a trauma clinic as central point to this poignant tale (“Tell my loved ones I feel certain / I’m a ghost ship, on a long trip”). It’s a song that has you reaching for the bottle and reliving your own worst moments.

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The trauma residue drips into Paloma and Profile. Droning, dream-shaped slowcore working against the vortex, as the protagonist remains entrenched in the blast zone of misery. On the latter, as Brokaw parts with the line, “You’re the outline to my profile / Nothing left to see”, it’s the kind of moment that cuts you in two.

While 8 or 9 Things churns and jangles, hitting similar frequencies to Anything Anymore but with more of a pop sheen, Ghost Ship ends fittingly with Away From Me. Cavernous, slow-motion rock designed for bars littered with tortured souls, as Brokaw sings, “Step across the world to me … Don’t you leave me now … Baby it’s just you and me”, it’s a dreamscape that encapsulates Ghost Ship. The “fever” that Brokaw speaks of, playing a prominent role in an album that is alongside his best. The kind of songs that can only be written through troubled times, it’s this rawness and genuine nature that makes Ghost Ship feel like an eternal companion.

Ghost Ship is out now via 12XU. Purchase from Bandcamp.