Here is a unique find. Something I've never heard done before. It is the latest work from progressive guitarist Shane Parish, whose solo exercises tend toward dedicated interpretations of various folk traditions. With his latest album Liverpool, he has seen fit to drop anchor into the deep loch of traditional sea shanties. The songs he has reeled in for this album were all originally meant to be sung, but Shane has cannily imitated them on guitar. Even more inspiring, he has elected to interpret these songs via electric guitar, lending back to each a certain resonance that would have otherwise been lost in translation. Shane has put to practice through Liverpool his theory that the enduring character of shanties is in part due to the way that they literally fill the body of the singer and listener in turn, tussling muscle and nerve fiber as they quiver and excitedly tremble with the resonance of the human voice. The appeal of these songs is therefore as physiological as they are aesthetic and cultural- faithfully connecting the singer with their audience in a manner of twin tuning forks picking up on each other's vibrations- only in a very literal sense. As for Shane's renditions, it is the clapping waves of feedback issued by his amplifiers that do the lifting that would otherwise be the burden and the joy of the human voice. Oddly enough, the thing that Shane's compositions remind me of the most is not open water, but open deserts. I have to attribute this to my American attachment to wide-open, and relatively barren places, as the resonance of his playing invokes in me images of expansive seas of sand under an overbearing sun, populated by low-lying shrubs, rows of desiccated telephone poles, barbed wire fences, and not much else. It's fitting that many of the real places that inspire the visions of parched patches of soil that sprawl endlessly in my mind were once engulfed by an inland sea- an enormous body of water that consumed much of North America in prehistory. There is nothing left of it now but bones and a sandy belly, transformed, like all things, great and small, by the eroding waves of time. Shane's guitar playing connected us to men, when men depended upon the sea, and allows us to see forward in time as well, to when the sea may no longer be there to succor the human race. I expected the songs on Liverpool to represent a profound sense of memory- I didn't expect how deeply they would penetrate into the cenote of geological time- a vector of millions of years, hastening simultaneously into an unknowable past and unfathomable future.
