Rise Ye Sunken Ships

There is no mistaking the signs of staggering depth in Rise Ye Sunken Ships. A remarkably accomplished album, it is deeply beautiful and emotionally cathartic.

Much of the material documents the most traumatic period of lead vocalist/guitarist McCarthy's life in which he lost both his schizophrenic mother and his brother, James, to suicide. "Keep your head up, kid/I know you can swim/But you've got to move your legs," McCarthy pleads in "Augustine" while "Headlong Into The Abyss" recounts James' flight from the police while "Book of James," one of several songs recorded with producer Dave Newfeld (Broken Social Scene), is a gripping eulogy for this once-resilient spirit who succumbed to the pressures bearing down on him from both within and without.

For McCarthy and Sanderson, it is the culmination of an extraordinary labour of love; a journey that has seen both suffer a collision of professional hardship and personal tragedy and yet come through strong the other side. For the rest of us, it is the music we've been missing, but always hoped was there.

With navigation essential to survival, We Are Augustines are steering a course by way of a chart speckled with the fragments of shattered dreams and guiding lights long extinguished. Not the easiest of paths to traverse, but then plain sailing was never their command. With Rise Ye Sunken Ships, however, a titanic struggle and musical vision is at last about to come to the surface.