Over the past 15 years, singer/songwriter and musician Jordan Geiger has developed a reputation for being incredibly prolific — he’s been a member of several renowned indie rock acts including Shearwater, The Appleseed Cast, Des Ark and Minus Story, and he’s released three albums with his solo recording project Hospital Ships. Geiger’s fourth full-length Hospital Ships effort, The Past is Not a Flood is slated for a March 11, 2016 release through Graveface Records, and the album features a myriad number of Austin, TX-based collaborators including longtime friend, Swans‘ Thor Harris — and is Geiger’s sixth album with renowned producer John Congleton, best known for his work with St. Vincent, The Walkmen, Modest Mouse and others.
Thematically speaking, The Past is Not a Flood reportedly draws from Geiger’s own battles with mental illness, anxiety and depression, which will arguably make his fourth full-length album his most personal one to date. The album’s first single “You and I” possesses a gorgeous painterly quality as layers of twisting and turning piano chords undulating and chiming percussion and ominously ambient electronics are slowly added like brushstrokes upon a canvas — and then they’re paired with Geiger’s achingly tender vocals expressing vulnerability, shame, regret and confusion over a dysfunctional and fucked up relationship that’s at an impasse. While sonically bearing a resemblance to Amnesiac-era Radiohead, Remember Remember and Mogwai‘s most recent ambient experiments “You and I” manages to feel like a lingering and anxious fever dream.
