Captain - This is Hazelville (EMI)
3/5
By: Michael Lewin
Captain, then: "perfect pop production", apparently; "snappy art-pop", say others, while yet more shout "soulful indie pop", "power pop", "utterly hummable pop" or...oh, whatever - "blah. Pop".
What do they mean? What do they mean with it? Why do they insist upon this "pop"? Pop pop pop, what an idiotic term. Write it and read it a bunch of times and try not to become convinced of everyone's sheer mad banality as one of the most recognisable of definitions in entertainment loses all meaning as you try to grasp for its point and find that, yes, in that most self-fulfilling of manners that names can have, pop proves as whispy, ethereal and intangible as the music it denotes. Sure we like it and we recognise it and it cuddles us and arouses us and does whatever it is that it does but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LOOK AT IT TOO CLOSELY, because it will simply disappear.
Think about it. On the one hand, an abbreviation for popular; in the other, weird hand with too many digits, something spiritual, something beyond merely personal and apparently unique. The most tangible of commodities, and yet one that is utterly ethereal and whispy, a puff of air and invisible vibrations. And Captain, supposedly, are it.
But they aren't! They're weird. They sound weird and they look weird and they are weird they're weird they're weird they're weird what are they doing?! Are people going to buy this? Why? Why are people going to give that nice man behind the counter actual pounds to feel weird?
They almost seem more likeable than food, all wistful and lovely and oh-so-melodic and hook-orientated and sometimes they might have balls - but not so big as to be unpalatable or difficult. They're very, very nearly banal, they're practically simplicity itself. It feels like it would take an effort not to like them. Captain are so close to being an exercise in being unconfrontational; they could almost be part of the scenery, and it's likely you wouldn't complain.
Basically, they feel like they should be classic, universally-agreeable pop. The kind of music that the only objection you can make about them is that they are so unobjectionable that they become offensive.
But they aren't! There's just this very tiny portion of weird in them, so small that after more than one listen you become so focused on working out why they're just ever-so-slightly weird that Captain become completely weird.
You see, it all feels so well-made, so calculated to be that perfect guitar pop product, so entirely pleasant and agreeable that you cannot help but assume every single aspect of 'This is Hazelville" is deliberate.
And yet there it is, this turbulent hint of weird disturbing your passage over a calm ocean of innocuously pleasant pop, and you become desperate, nearly mad, asking their music as it plays "Why? Why are you so slightly weird? Why did you decide to be very slightly weird but when otherwise you are too right and too POP? Why are you so slick and smooth? And seeing as you are going to be so slick and smooth, why are you singing about a pretend place you've made up and all the other weird things you do? Why why why? You're weird and you're making me feel weird."
I genuinely don't know what it is. Something just isn't right; not a bad not right, just a not right that is immediately noticeable, remains noticeable and becomes so noticeable that it consumes you, it and everything else and we're all not right.
You don't feel right as you listen to Captain. Perhaps they're water torture pop; maybe they're just too pop. But by being too pop, they aren't that simply defined 'pop' of commercial means. They're truly specialist, an acquired taste. Can that be pop? Is this the point when pop loses its etymological roots as an abbreviation of popular (as is the case of indie and independent), gaining only sensual meaning? The point when that idiotic, onomatopoeic three letter word suddenly acquires a meaning, one that you really can't define except as a feeling upon hearing? You know pop when you hear it. Captain feel like pop.
But THEY AREN'T! They are, as I may already have informed you, weird. It's too easy to call them pop, because they, well, wouldn't be so particularly weird, so slightly, distressingly and alienatingly weird. They're not-pop, they're un-pop, they're definitely part pop but they are certainly not just pop. Rather, they simply can't be.
I've tried to work out an empiric test, but that was always going to be futile. It's subjective, pop. So as a subjective test, get this album - don't pay for it, because it's wrong to pay for the dubious privelege of feeling not right. Take two pieces of paper and write the word POP on one, and WEIRD on the other. Listen to 'This is Hazelville' and stare at these two pieces of paper, and just feel those words. Get inside them, and try to make them fit Captain's sound.
I am certain the following will happen - you will understand 'pop', it will make sense as a word, and Captain will help you understand it. But it will not be right. You will look at 'weird', and you will agree with this word, it will feel...apt.
Is it likeable? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it shit? Is it awesome, fantastic, life-changing, depressing or moving? Will it make you dance, make you want to have sex on wind-swept beaches as tumultuous waves and chaotic, aggressive clouds herald the end of the world everywhere but where you are? Will it make you fall in love, make you skip work or school because life's so great/terrible? Will you want to play it again and again, or hunt down its creators in order to deal out that most just of vengeance, that vengeance reserved for those who have mortally offended us with their turgid outporings of creative self-expression? These are the wrong questions.
Will it make you feel weird? Yes. Yes it will. Slightly, minutely, all-consumingly weird. And a week later, you may very well want that weird again. But you really won't know why - and to make music that has such a result...well, that's just weird.
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