Listing Ship

"There's something about the saccharine female vocals and general sing-along folk weirdness of Listing Ship's Time To Dream that makes me more than a tad uneasy. They sound so sweet but there's something not quite right lurking just below the surface. It's like the pretty, smiling girl I saw the other day handing out her Church of Scientology booklets downtown. Sure, she looks harmless enough. Then before you know it, it's six months later and you're living at the cult's bucolic agrarian compound staring down a national stand-off with armed FBI and ATF agents, drinking funny-tasting Kool-Aid while wearing brand new Nike Heaven's Gate sneakers. What time is the fucking mothership supposed to be here to pick us up anyway Tom?! Tom?

"Ahem..yes. Where was I? Oh yeah, Listing Ship. Time To Dream contains fourteen hallucinations of traditional folk that stroke your hair with one hand while the other is beating you relentlessly about the face and neck area. It's the way folk music should be. The album is creepy and dark and unsettling, but with the right amount of charm and beauty to make it all go down a little easier.

"Take "Black Eyes Of The Sea" for example, where the sugary vocals of the Lockie sisters deliver lines like "Death comes as a comfort to the one who is suffering / and she's wiggling in its arms" as innocently as if they were singing a child to sleep. Or on the Cash-like "Sarah", when male singer Lyman Chaffee takes the vocal reins and coos, "I held her in my arms and said I loved her/ I kissed her on the lips and said she was mine / she closed her eyes and with her head upon my shoulder / I shot her in the side."

"Time To Dream is obsessed with death imagery, but this eccentric psych-folk ensemble makes death seem almost..inviting. Listing Ship is as deft with a murder ballad as Puerto Muerto is with a sea-shanty, and the two groups share a similarly odd originality. Mike Watt also plays bass on eight songs here, which should be reason enough for you to go out right now and buy this album. Now, who wants to hear more about Dianetics?"

- Mark Horan | 2006-04-18 l www.indieworkshop.com/music.php?id=2406 - www.indieworkshop.com

“It might seem appropriate to find Listing Ship's Time to Dream sandwiched right between Belle & Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens on some cutesy woodland creature's iPod. The album's layers of instrumentation are so lush with banjoes, violas, and mandolins they could blanket the driest fauna, and frontwoman Heather Lockie's voice is so saccharine it could soothe any saucer-eyed fawn. With innumerable references to nature – raindrops, sunshine, forests, and banana leaves among them -- it's hard to imagine that there's actually little that is benign about the Los Angeles-based collective's third release.

"In fact, there's a whole lot here that's scholarly in a rather ghastly way. When the band's male singer, Lyman Chaffee, takes over the vocal reins on only a few of the album's tracks, one can't help but listen more closely to the lines and recall some of the darker verses taught in Poetry 101. Robert Browning could have easily penned the dramatic monologue "Sarah," on which Chaffee imagines himself a war hero while channeling Johnny Cash's buttery baritone and emoting the abhorrent lines, "I held her in my arms and said I loved her/ I kissed her on the lips and said she was mine / she closed her eyes and with her / head upon my shoulder / I shot her in the side."

"While the album's death imagery hardly tries to dissuade the squirrels from scurrying, the Johnny-Appleseed whistling on "Destroying France," the French-bistro stomping of "Dans La Cuisine," and the lo-fi, crock-pot waltzing on "Baise Ca," are enough to convince us to stick around, and maybe even open up our dusty poetry books.”

by Julia Simon
January 5, 2006
http://www.spin.com/features/band_of_the_day/2006/01/060105_listingship/index.html

- www.SPIN.com

"Classicist rock gets a Spin"
by Kevin Bronson
Weekend Calendar Editor
http://www.calendarlive.com/nightlife/cl-wk-bands16feb16,0,6898433.story
"With its quavering vocals, gossamer strings and neo-hippie oeuvre, the L.A. seven-piece Listing Ship fashions the kind of edgy but folksy bluegrass you'd hear at a Mensa picnic, music that you imagine rising just above the chirping of cicadas. They may point their pens at Miss Piggy and ichabod Crane and write lines like "Death comes as a cornflake / to the one who's suffering," but there's electricity in their eccentricity.
Yet what were a bunch of violin-, viola- and mandolin-totin' classicists doing recently as "Band of the Day" on Spin.com?
"I'm mystified by that one," singer-guitarist (sic) Heather Lockie says.
"We sent it to Spin and somebody listened," says Lyman Chaffee, Lockie's songwriting collaborator.
Others are listening too. The group, which finishes up a residency the next two Mondays at the Echo, has garnered attenion for its eclectic album, "Time to Dream," released as part of the collective True Classical CDs. The band grew out of the '90s Lockie-Chaffee collaboration Leather Hyman. "It was much more rock-oriented then," Chaffee deadpans. "Then we got old."
Since 2001 the group has added Shawn Lockie, Julie Carpenter, Laura Steenberge, Kyle C. Kyle, and Michael Whitmore, many of whom play in other bands. Mike Watt even played bass on much of "Time to Dream."
"Somehow we're making this record collective work," Lockie says. "And we've expanded our expectations for this band based on the reaction we got to the record." - Los Angeles Times 2/16/06

SAID THE GRAMOPHONE: a music weblog
http://www.saidthegramophone.com/archives/as_promised_and_with.php
October 5, 2005
Listing Ship - "Baise Ca"
"'Baise Ca' can be understood as a suicide note of sorts, but its macabre elements extend beyond that interpretation. I’m reminded of the stark black and white images of the bayou in “Down By Law:” the anxiety inducing stillness of the water, a boat cutting through the green surface cautiously, mist and mazes. I’m also reminded of galleys and fires and war in muddy trenches. When I wrote about Think About Life about a month ago I flippantly referred to Heart of Darkness, and now I wish I hadn’t. Because above all, when I hear the tribal click and thud of the percussion and the funereal fiddle, when I hear the singer’s voice emerge, breathless and resigned; I think of Marlow sailing down the banks of the foggy Congo, losing his grasp on reality, seeing a harlequin waving eagerly in the distance."
Posted by Jordan at October 5, 2005 01:45 PM
- www.saidthegramphone.com

http://www.lovehasnologic.com/empme/2005/11/17/do-two-ships-an-armada-make/
November 17th, 2005
"As children, I am sure all of you did something completely irrational. Maybe you put a screw in your mouth only to have it get lodged into your jawbone. Or perhaps you stuffed a whole package of bakers chocolate into your mouth not realizing it is unsweetened. Maybe you recorded over your parents cassettes with the sounds of you making armpit farts near the microphone of the boombox they had just bought. While I most definitely never did any of those things, as I grew older I did some pretty stupid things. One of which was hide my love of all things twee throughout my high school years solely because my friends thought it sucked. Honest to god, I kept my Tiger Trap records wrapped up in an old pillowcase and stored them between my mattresses.
"No, Listing Ship have not released a twee record. However, the similarities are there. Strings untarnished by distortion. Female vocals that float in the air set against the occasional fragile male voice. An understated rhythm section, the use of violins and keyboards. Sounds fairly twee to me, but then again, on paper a flash-fried, bacon wrapped 1/2 pound of beef smothered in gyros meat, cheddar cheese sauce and mayonnaise should kill a man, but I have seen plenty walk away from tackling the three animal bohemoth. Where twee reveled in the overt cuteness of the basic pop structure, exaggerating and accentuating the sickeningly sweet in an evil plot to make the world smile, Listing Ship slow things down and apply a similar blueprint to the worlds of psych-folk singalongs and bluegrass porch tales. Seperately, many of the songs could easily be from different bands, but put together they showcase an extremely talented group of musicians working from a large pallette that keeps the listener guessing while always inviting them to immerse themselves deeper in the tracks. Time To Dream is one of the most exciting chill out records I’ve heard all year."
- www.lovehasnologic.com, mp3 weblog

by Josef Woodard
Monday, Dec. 5, p D3
"Opening the show...was the lovably clumsy, proudly eccentric, folk-pop-country-punk outfit LIsting Ship, whose members have played with the Eels and Brian Wilson....Los Angeles-based Listing Ship's refreshing deviation from musical normality begins with its instrumentation--including violin, viola and acoustic bass (bowed) and vibraphone. None of the singers is very special individually, but they often team up in harmonized melodies and sing lyrics containing dark irony and words you'll never find in the Bible.
"Conventional musical polish isn't the goal here. In general, the admittedly gawky aspects of their musical presentation are in keeping with their persona, as a project far to the left of any mainstream genre. They're prone to adapt various alternative attitudes--from the realms of punk art pop and musical folk art. While their music is undoubtedly an acquired taste, for those with the taste, Listing Ship is onto something new and engagingly offbeat." - Santa Barbara News-Press

http://www.musicspectrum.org/2006/03/collegeart-rock-listing-ships-time-to.html
3/5/06
"Even the group’s name is a story, Listing Ship.

"Minimalist pop folk compositions greet you on Listing Ship’s Time to Dream, but each sweetly crafted tune has a tale to tell. They have the ability of traditional Irish, English, or Scottish tunes which tell foreboding stories amid reels and jigs. Listing Ship can similarly weave warning, heartache, and hope into their light tunes which bounce and pop.

“American Song,” carried by the lead vocal of Heather Lockie, is a going to war story told from the perspective of the 13-year-old girl, pregnant with this young soldier’s child. It could be World War I; it could be the Civil War; it could the Second Gulf War. The music has allows there to be a timeless quality to the yellowed and/or crisply new pages of this story.

"The waltzing feel of “Destroying France” takes us back to the days when Beta and VHS were both still viable options. It’s a childhood of make believe, boring games of Monopoly, and time with siblings. I didn’t pretend to be at war with France, as in the song, but you listen to these sweet vocals on the Lyman Chaffee-penned tune (lyrics by Heather Lockie) and you know that you once played in the backyard in that same world.

"Listing Ship also includes a cover song—well, at least, it’s a cover song in the sense that it is there rendition of an old story. “Ichabod Crane” gives such tenderness to the angular, awkward, sad-for-love Crane. Meanwhile, there’s something telling in singing of Crane’s love named Katrina saying, 'For dear Katrina/has true aim/and all the force/of an ample bosom, inheritance, popularity.'"
- www.musicspectrum.org

Issue 42, Winter 2006

"The Shaggs with talent." - Rocktober

Open Mic, April 7, 2006 ·
"Songwriters Lyman Chaffee and Heather Lockie are Listing Ship. The Los Angeles-based, seven-piece band is organic and quirky, with a sound that the L.A. Times once described as "the kind of edgy but folksy bluegrass you'd hear at a Mensa picnic, music that you imagine rising just above the chirping of cicadas."

"Listing Ship's eclectic sound is, in part, due to their creative instrumentation, with Lockie and Chaffee both on banjo, Julie Carpenter on violin and Michael Whitmore on everything from 10-string guitar to vibraphone.

The featured track from Time to Dream is "Chinese Song," a delicately sweeping track featuring Chaffee's haunting croon."
- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5316261

week of 4/3/06:
"Oh my. Listing Ship’s TIME TO DREAM is like an American version of Japanese cutegirl pop with a serious undertone. And it’s seriously great. A tremendous concentration on the gentle vocals backed by almost minimalist guitar work makes a lovely track about childhood and siblings (“Destroying France”) grow from mere anecdote to tribute. The musical style brings the listener’s focus to the lyrics which are suitably mysterious, evocative and layered. I’m still working through a track like “Ichabod Crane” with its coda of “I fall asleep and dream of meat/smoked sides of ham/Cornish hen/and headless men” or the backwards track “Eda No Mel” (see their first album). And let’s not forget the opening “American Song” which would have made a No. 1 hit in the Vietnam era and still holds true today. So beautiful, so sad, so strong, I keep going back and listening to it again and again. Much like this entire CD. You’re not going to get your rock jones off here; this is straight sweet vocal brilliance for those of us who don’t always need or want an aural assault. Puffy AmiYumi mixed with Black Box Recorder and Bono. Pure. Good. Necessary." –Mark Rose
- www.hitchmagazine.com/music-reviews/listing-ship/