What is the enduring draw in music about sinking ships? Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic, Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, and the Shipwreck Radio series. And now Andrew Liles' new work The Dying Submariner. Perhaps it’s a fascination with the land mammal's return to the primordial soup that drowning in a cold unforgiving sea symbolizes. Perhaps it’s a socioeconomic statement about the inevitable demise of the "ship of state." Or maybe it’s the appropriateness of a burial at sea as a modern compositional twist on that old genre warhorse the funeral mass. Whatever it is, the "sinking ship" genre appears unsinkable.
That being said, The Dying Submariner is hardly a rehash of the existing canon. While it is likely to earn comparisons to the earlier entries mentioned above, there's a crucial difference here. While Bryars focused on a famous catastrophe affecting hundreds of lives, Liles' subject is so anonymous he is known only by his occupation. And even though the genre demands slow evolution and repetition of themes, the NWW entries are more eerily creepy than somber. And let's face it, while it's also kind of creepy, not much is more somber than contemplating dying alone at the bottom of the ocean. It practically defines somber.
This is deep water music. Even the cover is adorned by the sort of hideously deformed bulging eyeballed, razor fanged fishes that only live at depths where the atmospheric pressure is an order of magnitude greater than that on the surface of the earth. The sounds that comprise The Dying Submariner’s four part concerto will be immediately familiar to anyone who ever put a brick on the sustain pedal of their grandparents' piano to create enough mobility to go nuts on the leftmost keys. Part I balances between unearthly bass rumblings and reverberant sheets of the fleeting sonic afterimage of a descending melody, the piece flutters steadily downward away from the light of the surface; the audio equivalent of the submarine’s weak headlamp growing dimmer as it plunges further into the abyss. Did I mention this was somber?
Part II offers some brief respite from the inexorable spiral in the form of a slowly coalescing chord sequence that ends up sounding more like the intro to a Mogwai post-rock opus than the grim farewell that preceded it. Maybe this is the point where the submariner is tempted to swim “towards the light”, but if so, the branch of hope that is extended is short-lived because the claustrophobia returns in the tightly wound cascading arpeggios of Part III. Part IV is clearly the point where our hero bites it. Its spare, lingering notes are easily the most funereal of the whole disc.
This is not one of those records I’m going to pull out to listen to again that often. Even the admittedly subtle musical variations on the basic theme Liles presents early on are not likely to make me brave the intensity and frankly depressing prospect of such a death documented over an hour plus. But there are definitely moments of fragile beauty here as well as a compelling (if morbid) narrative and those willing to travel to the depths with Liles and his submariner may find the trip worthwhile.
