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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | The Capstan Shafts, FIXATION PROTOCOLS |
| Date | Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:32:04 -0400 |
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What's that? You say you like mid-period Guided By Voices in
theory -- buncha guys from Ohio with faux British accents and
fuzzboxes distilling the Who and the Kinks into under-two-minute
chunks -- but you found the records themselves too sloppy, too noisy
and too unedited? What you need are the Capstan Shafts.
Seriously, the Capstan Shafts' second album FIXATION PROTOCOLS (out
now on Rainbow Quartz) is basically the album Robert Pollard and crew
could have made in between ALIEN LANES and UNDER THE BUSHES, UNDER THE
STARS but didn't: practically every one of these 22 songs is under two
minutes long (the whole album is over in less than 30 minutes) and
consists of loose, scrappy little guitar pop tunes under punny, non
sequitur lyrics delivered in a midwestern approximation of a British
accent. It's quite homemade-sounding (the Capstan Shafts are one guy,
Dean Wells), but home recording equipment has improved considerably
since the days when Guided By Voices were working with a cassette
four-track with one broken track, so the hiss and tape glitches are
largely eliminated, and Wells seems to have a better internal editor
than Pollard did, so even the songs that are 48 seconds long sound
fully constructed. If this sounds at all appealing, do check it out.
I really liked it even despite the general lack of novelty.
S
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