Tuesday 12.04.07: PORT O’BRIEN

Posted by damara - filed in events

Port O’Brien

But Port O’Brien has earned the right to the salt-crusted imagery adorning its first full-length, The Wind and the Swell, as well as to the numerous mentions of seas and oceans and fishing boats and puffins in these jagged, intelligent indie-folk songs. Port O’Brien mainstay Van Pierszalowski, a California native and son of a commercial fisherman, spends his summers aboard an Alaskan salmon schooner, either fighting the seas or bored in port if the weather’s bad. He named the band after an Alaskan port, uses photos of his father’s crew as album art, and keeps a detailed ship’s blog on the group’s web site. But The Wind and the Swell, which collects the group’s first two out-of-print releases on one disc, sounds like a much better journal of days at sea. Like most tracks, opener “I Woke Up Today” could be a sea-legs lament: “Yes I understand I cannot live on this land,” Pierszalowski sings, “but does that truly mean I have seen all that can be seen?” The song is all windworn surfaces: the guitars sound rough and creaky, the voices cracked but resolute. These same lyrics repeat on the sparse closer “Simple Way”, which slows the tempo and pares down the music: instead of a stormy passage, the song fades gradually, like land disappearing on the horizon. – Pitchfork

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