June of 44 - 'Tropics and Meridians' (Quarterstick)

I'm going to show my age a bit now by remembering the strange and somewhat maligned sub-genre of late 90s indie rock that we called "boat rock", or maybe it was "nautical rock". This was before Channel 101 made those highlarious Yacht Rock comedy sketches, and it wasn't anything to do with the smooth sounds of Christopher Cross or the Doobie Brothers. This was truly a sub-sub-genre or maybe even a sub-sub-sub-genre, unified by the curious trend of writing songs about nautical life.  I can remember the biggest proponents of this being June of 44 and a somewhat related band called Shipping News, both who emerged after the dissolution of the mighty Rodan. I can also remember a band called Victory at Sea and then some very 'local' bands that never released anything, as well as other regional ones from the same era (1996-2000) who maybe never released anything either and are now mostly forgotten but passed through my town a few times. Or maybe "boat rock" was never such a big thing beyond these few bands, but at the time, it certainly felt like a trend that quickly became tiresome while being somewhat inexplicable as well. June of 44 dropped boat references all over their work; their first album is called Engine Takes to the Water (though I like to think it's about a jet ski), and there's a sailor tattoo on the cover of this one, and they had this kinda annoying, kinda brilliant song called 'Sharks and Sailors'. I watched the Slint documentary a few weeks ago and ever since I've been jamming Tweez a lot; I guess this is the third generation of Louisville bands (Rodan came after Slint, and June of '44/Rachel's/Shipping News/The Sonora Pine after Rodan, though by the time of Tropics and Meridians the band had moved to Chicago. So what does this record sound like? Essentially like a third generation Slint, who took their musical cues from that band's more copied works (cough, 'Washer', cough) than their more innovative ones (say, 'Nan Ding'). You can hear this most evidently on this record's 'Lusitania' (hey, that's a song about a boat!) which propels along with a 5/4 beat and whispered/spoken vocals. It's probably the strongest cut on the record, with a sinewy guitar line that keeps folding in on itself and actually conveys a circular feeling of sinking. I had forgotten all about it, but not about the epic opener 'Anisette', a thunderous and slow jam that builds eventually to a screaming force after about nine minutes. No one ever called this stuff 'screamo' at the time, but it was intensely serious guitar based music with a tendency to explode both musically and vocally. I guess we called this post-rock though it feels pretty straight-forward in places. When there are scratchy, interlocking guitars ('June Leaf', 'Arms Over Arteries') June of 44 sound like a pretty tight, impressive band. The careful, whispered singing on the latter sounds like Bedhead and that's always a good thing. 'Sanctioned in a Birdcage' does everything it's supposed to do, painting by numbers with a powerful punching bass sound, guitar playing that mimics the militaristic theme of the lyrics (shards and muted single notes on one, against ringing arpeggios on the other) and a nice growl on the vocals (which shout 'Where did the birds go?' a few times, which is either brilliant or hilarious or both). I lost interest in these guys so I've never heard their last two albums, because it started to feel derivative and a bit tired by 1999 or so. I still jam the Rodan record a good bit but the offshoots I have mostly forgotten, except the second Sonora Pine record which remains an underrated gem of that whole movement. Yet there's a reason I always held on to this record; maybe it's a bit of teenage nostalgia for me (I was still in high school when I bought this) or maybe because it's a solid document of a time when this music genuinely inspired me; this is a roundabout way of confessing that Tropics and Meridians sounds pretty good right about now. While my tone here is somewhat teasing, I don't begrudge these guys for writing songs about boats; it's better than another album of songs about girls, or cars, or whatever the fuck men normally tend to write rock songs about. And their interest in literature (the band is named after Henry Miller's wife, and their first album has a song about her which is one of their best, perhaps because it's one of their most concise) is also commendable, even if it maybe seems in retrospect like a superficial affectation. I think I used to listen to this a lot, and I've dragged it around for 21 years, so it sounds kinda rough now, beat up and scratched and the victim of years of poor turntable/stylus choices. Which is also a shame; the recording by Bob Weston should sound explosive and thundering, and those drums on 'Anisette' I remember well, though this particular replication of them has suffered. This comes packaged with a beautiful set of art stamps, not legal US postage but lovely nonetheless, depicting, mostly, well, boats. Can you remember some other "boat rock" bands?