Pacific·
Moby Dick opens with a passage that has stuck with me since I first read it. Not the famous “Call me Ishmael,” but what comes immediately afterward: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can…There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”
It stuck with me because I do.
I grew up landlocked; the reservoir in Pueblo seemed to me a vast inland sea in the dry countryside of Colorado. I didn’t long for the ocean. The sky was too open to feel claustrophobic. But on those occasions when my family did travel to a coast, something about it captivated me.
The flatness. The infinity. The dividing line between sea and sky. The steady wash of waves. A thin crust of salt collecting on my skin. Summer beaches in the Dominican Republic, yellow and blue and pretty as a picture. Black pebble beaches in Iceland, white skies and verdant slopes.
But particularly the ocean under clouds. The ocean gray-green and rocky. The ocean at twilight; the ocean after dark. One memorable night in the summer I turned twenty-one I went walking on the beach. The sea roared beside me and I felt alive, puissant, as though I was the water and not the fragile body beside it. Someone who knew that beach better than I did urged me away from the shore and the dangerous tide. I retreated obediently, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay.
I first listened to The End of the Ocean’s 2011 album Pacific·
The album is noteworthy among my post-rock favorites for its buoyancy. The first track, “On the Long Road Home,” sets this tone with an energetic and uplifting ten minutes that evoke for me the ocean in the morning. The sky is blue and endless; the sea is clear and calm. A song, as the title implies, for a sailor heading homeward with a favorable wind in the sails.
When I go to the beach, I make it a point to listen to Pacific·
In August of 2024 my beach day came in Ipswich, a quintessential New England town about thirty miles north of the city. It came at the end of a summer that had passed like a hurricane and left me clinging to flotsam. There were many other beachgoers but I was nonetheless alone there under an empty sky at the edge of the world. I was taking a break from my life. Crane Beach was pale and soft underfoot as I followed it south, as the towels and beach umbrellas thinned out, as schools of tiny fish darted around my feet with every gentle wave. I listened to the water and the seagulls. And then, when I found a quiet place on the sand, I listened to the album. “On the Long Road Home” felt very fitting as I lay there. Together the music and the sun painted the world in vivid color.
The tracks that follow, “Verses from Our Captain,” “Worth Everything Ever Wished For,” and “To Be Buried and Discovered Again” are not brimming with the same overflowing energy. Here the tide goes out a little bit, exposing wet sand and intertidal pools. The music swells and ebbs and flows, and there are hints of the melancholy that will swallow the end of the album. The midday sun gives way to an afternoon sky speckled with clouds. Still the sand is warm and the waves are welcoming. Lying on the beach and dreaming salt-encrusted dreams I feel mellow and peaceful.
In addition to the standard guitars and drums of the genre, Pacific·
Then “May Be for the Better” comes roaring in with a rush of sound and feeling like the sun bursting from behind a cloud.
It was not until I looked at the album on Bandcamp as part of writing this essay that I discovered that it is meant to be divided, like its title, right down the middle; the first four tracks belong to Pacific and the latter four to Atlantic. In that context “May Be for the Better” starts the journey on a new ocean, its energy and function like that of “On the Long Road Home.” It is an ebullient midpoint, a rallying cry. But it is short and not entirely so upbeat. It ends on a note of unresolved tension. The following “Southern Skies,” more sedate, also lacks the major key that defined the first part of the album.
This is why I love Pacific·
To that end “A Dividing Line” serves as the delimiter its name implies. The clouds have come; the sun is setting. I am standing alone on a beach with a strange longing to be out at sea. The sky is gold and the sun has disappeared. The world around me is very beautiful but in a way that makes me ache.
And then the penultimate track gives way to one of my favorite songs, and not just in post-rock.
As I listen to it now and write this, another memory forces its fingers down my throat. In the summer of 2022 I spent a single night in Provincetown. Under a sunset-painted sky I walked along the beach and crossed a rock jetty. I saw a horseshoe crab, conjuring thoughts of another favorite song. I saw people, far away and close by and all infinitely distant. How lovely that place was, its quaint storefronts and yards overflowing with flowers. How lovely and how unreal. And there I was, the hooks of my own all-too-real life gouging holes in my skin. I was trying to pull away. I was desperate for anything else. An escape to that town or to the sea beside it.
The longing and the hollowness—“We Always Think There Is Going To Be More Time…” speaks to that.
The landscape of post-rock is replete with odd and long and lofty titles. All too often an album title or track name seizes my attention but fails to keep it. There is only the title, only the pretty shell. But this is not one of those songs. In this case the music and its name are inseparable. All that the title implies, the bittersweetness, the mourning, the desperation, all of it sings clearly through.
It starts gently, with a single repeated phrase. It makes me think of the ocean under a dark sky, of turning and walking directly into the water. At first my feet can touch the bottom. Then the percussion joins in with a driving beat. The sea is rising; it is no longer so placid. I am forced to swim.
The song consists of repeating parts woven together. Percussion and bass come in and out; here is a rolling cymbal like a foaming sea, there a single resonant bass note. The guitar introduces new motifs and then the other instruments follow. Lull and climax, peak and trough, the waves come and go.
And in the end the percussion recedes. The guitar and bass give way to synths sounding a singular plaintive refrain over and over again.
Maybe the sea has swallowed me. Maybe it’s left me back on the beach, wishing that it had.
Trying to describe it feels futile. Listen to it yourself. The whole album, if you have the requisite hour. Or just the last song. Listen to it, and think about the ocean, and the time that’s already been swept away.
I have many memories of this last song. Listening to it with my parents in a hotel room in Estonia, where they pronounced it very nice (high praise compared to that elicited by the other post-rock fare I had offered them). Listening to it on New Year’s Eve as 2016 rolled into 2017 and I was again in the throes of my resolute recurring unhappiness. Listening to it outside on a rainy afternoon in June 2017 after holding my dog as he went to sleep for the last time. And again, and again. I wander along more oceans in my memory. Castle Island on a clear and cold winter day. San Francisco swallowed in fog. A cloud-swathed sun in a white sky peering down at Mont-Saint-Michel in the midst of an expanse more mud than sea, and me in the muck of my mind.
The ocean invariably marks for me a day worth remembering, something out of the ordinary, a rogue wave towering high above my doldrums. I look backward at these days like each is a lighthouse and I crash on the rocks in my distraction. I fail to learn the lesson that my other days are valuable too, that my present and future deserve the same attention I pay the past. I haven’t yet grasped that my time isn’t infinite.
I always think there is going to be more of it.