| · My new out of nowhere heroes.
Once in a while, and not all that often, there's a record that comes your way seemingly out of thin air that fills in a gap you never really even knew existed. Like an angered bastard cousin of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over The Sea (international indie hipster standard issue – comes with your membership kit), The Captain Is Dead Let the Drum Corpse Dance sounds like the work of a 100-strong collective of musical madmen living off magic mushrooms and Beach Boys bootlegs off in an undiscovered forest somewhere.
While the Elephant 6 collective seem to have all but disappeared from the face of the planet (Jeff Magnum, where are you?), the Minus Story kids pick up the torch, sharing similar signposts – cavernous production, pop hooks so simple and obvious it's hard to believe nobody’s come up with them before and a shroud of mystery hanging over it all (for example, who is Nick Christus and why is he credited here with wizardry?).
It's all here in a breakneck 35-minutes – the piano-led epic war march ballad "Open Your Eyes," the vicious drum-roll melted tape attack of "The Happy Activist," the bop-bop-bop singalong of "Joyless, Joyless" and the gorgeous climax of "You're My Air."
Like many of my favourite records, Captain is the type of album that has so much going on at any given moment (balanced perfectly with the innate knowledge of when to leave well enough alone – call it minimalist maximalism), I'll be stuck inside it for ages.
Wizardry indeed.
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