Enthusiasts of Post-Punk New Wave who grew up immersed in the music of pioneers of the genre should be really digging Maritime, an American band that has been in existence for about twelve years now. Maritime is armed already with five full-length albums of consistently styled songs that thrive on guitar angularity, keyboard melodies, rolling basslines, tribal drumbeats, a sense of urgency in the vocal delivery, and thought-provoking lyrics. All Maritime needs now is for more New Wave and Indie Pop enthusiasts to discover its worthwhile music.
Formed in 2003, in Wisconsin, United States, Maritime currently consists of Davey von Bohlen (vocals/guitars), Dan Didier (drums), Justin Klug (bass), and Dan Hinz (guitars/keyboards). To date, the band has released five full-length albums, from 2004’s Glass Floor to this year’s Magnetic Bodies/Maps of Bones. Listening to the entirety of Maritime’s studio discography with a sense of attention to details, one can immediately recognize that the band has a focused musical vision and a clear sense of roots.
The engineering of each of the albums is in congruence with one another, easily defining Maritime’s distinct trademark sound. Its sonic lineage may be traced as far back as to the classic aural architecture of Post-Punk New Wave pioneers such as Joy Division (“Love Will Tear Us Apart”), Siouxsie & the Banshees (“Mirage”), Gang of Four (“Damaged Goods”), The Cure (10:15 Saturday Night”), Echo & the Bunnymen (“The Cutter”), and The Smiths (“This Charming Man”). One may even glean from some of Maritime’s songs a bit of The Housemartins (“Happy Hour”) and New Order (“Regret”) when the latter is being guitar-oriented; or may notice from them auricular allegiance with recent purveyors of the genre such as The Killers (“Change Your Mind”), Franz Ferdinand (“Take Me Out”), Nightmare of You (“The Days Go By Oh So Slow”), British Sea Power (“Please Stand Up”), and Two Door Cinema Club (“Undercover Martyn”).
Released on July 16, 2015, Magnetic Bodies/Maps of Bones, Maritime’s latest, fifth album, is yet another testament of such stylistic consistency. The album cover alone evokes the pulsar imagery of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, enough to conjure musical landscapes once populated by Maritime’s sonic descendants. It serves as a subliminal attraction for whatever it contains. It opens with the shoegazey, midtempo “Nothing Is Forgot,” whose combination of crunchy and shimmering guitars complements its bittersweet lyrical theme. It may remind the initiated of similar sentiments once expressed by Chainsaw Kittens (“Never to Be Found”) and Doves (“The Cedar Room”). “Satellite Love” comes prancing next like The Cure’s “Close to Me,” and whose catchy synthesizer lines and sparkly guitar arpeggios will certainly cause New Wave aficionados themselves to prance their way onto the dance floor. An intricate Johnny Marr-inspired guitar styling then weaves into “Roaming Empire,” which an uninitiated listener could easily mistake for a The Smiths (“Handsome Devil”) or a Smoking Popes (“Rubella”). Maritime makes sure that the high energy is maintained with the ensuing driving beat of “Light You Up.”
The acoustic-oriented “War Tattoos” has that Pastoral Pop flavor akin to the style of the likes of Fleet Foxes (“Ragged Wood”), Of Monster and Men (“Little Talks”), Boy & Bear (“Milk & Sticks”), and Mumford & Sons (“I Will Wait”). The same vibe, albeit a bit fuzzier-sound, flows into “Drinking Peru.” Maritime seems to be channeling an inevitable influence of Dinosaur Jr. (“I Don’t Think So”) and My Bloody Valentine (“Strawberry Wine”) in this particular track.
Classic New Wave and Indie Pop fans will surely regard “Collar Bones” as the highlight of the album, for it has all the prerequisite characteristics of a standard New Wave/Indie Pop song – upbeatness, catchy guitar and keyboard melodies, tribal drumming, and introspective vocal approach. The already upbeat tempo shifts even higher to a hyperdrive as “Inside Out” plays. This will not be out of place on a playlist that includes Nightmare of You’s “Ode to Serotonin” and XTC’s “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead.” The mood of “Love You in the Dark” then takes the listener to a relaxing place, which is just fitting considering the lyrical sentiments of the song. Finally, Magnetic Bodies/Maps of Bones closes with the similar medium-tempo, electric-guitar-dominant balladry of “When the Bone Moon Does.”
Many musicologists confine genres within certain decades or eras, failing to acknowledge that, once established and well defined and characterized, genres become legitimate and constant as long as there are bands—either old and new—whose music styling fits the general description. Or, maybe some journalists just want to capitalize on a scoop for their own relevancy and fear for their mortality, the reason they tend to create new genre names that are anyway redundant and superfluous, instead of using older ones that are usually deemed sufficient descriptors. For instance, even when the music of many bands would fall gracefully under New Wave or Metal, some writers with charlatanistic tendencies would prefer bombarding the music world with many unnecessary terms like Dark Wave, Soft Wave, Electric Wave, Emocore, Grindcore, Popcore, Manticore, and whatever other waves and metallic cores they could think of. Maritime is one example of this.
In spite of having been described in so many ways, the band’s music will easily fall under Post-Punk New Wave or Indie Pop, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it even makes the band’s music more grounded and special, allowing it to achieve a sense of belonging…there in the same palette that its predecessors inhabit. All the listener needs to do now is play Magnetic Bodies/Maps of Bones one more time and then follow it up with Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, Siouxsie & the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope, Echo & the Bunnymen’s Porcupine, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, The Housemartins’ London o Hull 4, The Killers’ Hot Fuss, British Sea Power’s Open Season, and Two Door Cinema Club’s Tourist History, and he will not notice that he just listened to albums that came from different eras. That is the timeless beauty that Maritime’s Magnetic Bodies/Maps of Bones shares with all these classics and soon-to-be classics. CrypticRock gives it 4 out of 5 stars.
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