Conceptual pieces and performance can easily go awry. It takes quality songwriting and a real performative commitment to not only tell a story, but to imbue it with intellectual and emotional resonance. On its new album Of Ghosts and Gods, transatlantic folk duo David Berkeley and Ben Parker, aka Sons of Town Hall, bring a decade’s worth of musical exploration and collaboration together to bring to life a dozen songs rich in songcraft and worldbuilding.
The album opens with the introspective “Gods.” On it, the narrators lay out the ideals that cause one to uproot their lives in pursuit of meaning or a new destiny. Succeeding song “How to Build a Boat” dramatically, ahem, builds off that message. Berkeley and Parker’s performative personas Josiah Chester Jones and George Ulysses Brown lay out in melodic detail the construction of their boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The dramatic build of “How to Build a Boat” is impressive, buoyed by an orchestral swell that accentuates the power and meaning behind the chorus’ lines of “We’ll break free this time, we’ll cut the ties that bind us.”
