The six songs on Save Everything (Quarterstick, 1997) summarize several different ways of making music within the post-rock dogma, from the tough and neurotic rock of Books On Trains to the oneiric All By Electricity. Even more interesting are the dub and hard-rock fragments that drift away in the ten minutes of Steerage, as well as the tenuous almost transcendent filigrees of A True Lover's Knot. Often this music for rock trio sounds like the post-rock equivalent of ambient music: atmospheric music in which nothing seems to happen, constructed through elementary blocks of sound.

Very Soon And In Pleasant Company (Quarterstick, 2000) finds the Shipping News' core unit of Jason Noble, Jeff Mueller, and Kyle Crabtree augmented by sound engineer Christina Files and with outside help from members of Noble's other group, the Rachel's. These additions allow the Shipping News to truly offer the best of two worlds: the skewed, conceptual harmonies of June Of 44 (of which Mueller was a principal) and the quasi-classical scores of Rachel's.
The undulating The March Song builds a bridge between hard rock and jazz rock, leveraging cubistic guitar and bass duets. The instrumental Nine Bodies Nine States is slightly more atonal, while the lengthy and subdued Quiet Victories lets a whisper drift over spare beats and then musters visceral forces to counter its lethargy. The effect is psychedelic and otherworldly.
The equally long Contents Of A Landfill achieves the same kind of hazy trance but the music sinks into the serene dejection of a Tim Buckley or Nick Drake before rising again in an heavenly guitar-driven theme. Actual Blood is a bluesy, mournful dirge augmented with piano and cello. Later, the soft, liquid strumming of How To Draw Horses conjures Bach for the math-rock generation.
The trio has found a format that is less cerebral and more malleable. The music flows naturally, the instruments chat warmly and peacefully, and melodic undercurrents provide the center of gravity. While certainly not pop, Shipping News write "songs" that do not indulge in difficult passages and progressive-rock constructions. It feels more like a consummate storyteller spinning a tale, albeit an unusual one, full of twists and surprises.

Three-Four (Quarterstick, 2003) compiles three EPs, Carrier, Variegated and Sickening Bridge, for which each of the three members contributed "solo" songs, and adds three new songs. The highlights are Noble's eight-minute Paper Lanterns, Crabtree's extended instrumental Haymaker, the stripped-down psychedelia of Variegated and the post-rock romp of You Can't Hide the Mark Inside. But the album as a whole is not justified. Each of the three EPs was a very minor work, and the whole is worth less than its parts.

Flies The Fields (Quarterstick, 2005) is one of the albums that evoke most closely Slint's turbulent unemotional anti-epos. The instrumental Louven, Demon and It's Not Too Late are representative of a style that has become a classic form of art. The only drawback is that... we heard this before.

One Less Heartless To Fear (2010) compiles live performances of mostly unreleased songs from 2006 and 2009 that demonstrate a much more aggressive stance.