Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager (Atlantic)
2/5
By: Chris Pratt
I'll freely admit that Get Cape a.k.a Sam Duckworth has struck gold with his selection of moniker - it makes me want to bust out the SNES for a quick 'Super Mario World' session every time I hear it. However, that doesn't even begin to excuse him for the pretentious, awkwardly self-mythologizing choice of debut album title. Turns out that this record can be pretty bad - a leaden trudge through the mind of a mawkish twenty-year-old, but it's not as bad as that title might suggest.
Duckworth starts with what are usually reliable indie-rock foundations and somehow ends up getting it all wrong - an acoustic guitar and voice, often coloured with drumming (both human-played and electronic), analogue synth lines and plenty of trumpet - there are loads of people who work with a similarly basic sonic palette and always make it sound fresh and absorbing. Duckworth, in spite of his quirky stage name, manages to wring all the character out of these instruments, creating tired and workmanlike arrangements - the sort of thing you'd expect from someone's twenty-fifth album, certainly not their first. At least he doesn't sing with an American accent, although it's difficult to detect any real emotion in the repetitive vocals - when Duckworth hushes down he's never heartbreaking and when he does loud and passionate it's difficult to see what he's getting so worked up about.
Lyrically 'Chronicles...' falls somewhat flat too - despite attempts at tackling a whole host of global and personal subjects (hipster snobs to mass consumerism, small-town boredom to provincial racists, customary relationship issues) Duckworth lacks the crucial ability to condense thoughts down into evocative yet concise lines, leaving his words sounding clumsy and unnatural. He often goes in for the kind of lyrical self-reference that Tim Kasher perfected in Cursive's heyday, but without any of that Kasher artfulness, instead sounding self-important and often little more than an emo cliché.
There are a lot of quasi-disaffected, middle-class youths out there who will probably go nuts for Duckworth's Dashboard Confessional-meets-Billy Bragg shtick, especially when it's being stuffed down their ears on a regular basis by Radio One. That's pretty annoying when you consider the huge number of inventive, one-of-a-kind solo artists that are making beautiful music in their bedrooms as we speak, people who could create something fantastic given the vast amount of Atlantic bucks that Duckworth must now have stuffed into his piggybank, but then, that's major labels for you.
Artists in this article: Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
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