The Capstan Shafts Chick Cigarettes

I was going to say that this album is to The Capstan Shafts as Propeller was to Guided by Voices — the dodgily-recorded breakthrough early album packed with catchy songs. Well, this album may not be as good as GBV’s Propeller. But it’s pretty durn good, and despite the obvious influence of Robert Pollard on Dean Edward Wells, it’s good in a very different, uniquely Capstan Shafts-y, way.

New Grenada Parting Shots



This release does not feature the excellent song “Parting Shots” (a.k.a. the “he’s constantly thinking about what you’re thinking about him” song); they saved that for the follow up Modern Problems. But it still has brainy co-ed spiky tuneful indie goodness a-plenty in songs like “Nerd Alert” and “Just Inside a Week.” And the design is gorgeous.

The Capstan Shafts Her Versus the Sad Cold Eventually


An instant classic. Wells dramatically expands his sonic palette, and improbably comes up with a batch of songs not overshadowed by their awesome titles. There’s “He Would Die for You (Were It Up to Me),” (a murderously green-eyed, yet lovely, piano interlude) “‘Lauren Behold’ (A Conversation with a Stripper over Canadian-style Health Care),” (acoustic pop song enlivened by squally electric guitar underpinnings), and “She Can’t Stand the Quiet (Unless It’s Me Shutting Up),” (a plaintive, atonal, but oddly compelling,lament) — and 17 more.

I loved it so much I bought several copies as gifts.

1. Set up a browser (or browser profile) to delete all cookies on exit
   I like to configure Opera up for visiting unsafe sites, that way I can leave Firefox open with all the tabs I need for work.
2. Make sure it has all the latest security updates to prevent drive-by downloads
3. Close and relaunch the browser
4. Turn the speakers down!
5. Visit MySpace
6. Close the browser

I’ve been impatiently wondering when the first releases of 2008 from The Capstan Shafts would arrive, and just learned of all the goodies at http://www.myspace.com/capstanshafts. There are previews from both the new self-released EP Miles Per Famine and the upcoming Rainbow Quartz release Fixation Protocol. Also, there’s ordering info on getting gobs of the earlier and out-of-print Capstan Shafts releases directly from Dean. Big ups to Dan for giving me the heads-up.

You can also preview tracks from Ho-Ag’s imminent Doctor Cowboy at http://www.myspace.com/hoagsobject. I’m so pysched for this album. I’ve been wishing for a while that Ho-Ag would work with recording professionals who could capture the band better, and it sounds like I’ve gotten my wish. The samples from Doctor Cowboy are more vibrant than anything Ho-Ag has yet committed to plastic.

Slightly old news at this point, but Hallelujah the Hills have also raised their recording-quality bar with the Prepare to Qualify EP. It compiles the songs that have been trickling out from Stereogum and the like with some additional goodies; they’ve been re-mastered and sound super-fab.

And finally, I just stumbled on the Dirt Merchants site, from which you can download everything the band ever did, including the never-released The Speed At Which You Speak and several live sets. The only thing missing is a tip jar.

Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. She assembled her first release, 2005’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers by manipulating samples from old records — the sort of records that are usually filed in the “classical” section, whether or not the composers are strictly from the early 18th through early 19th centuries. That album’s extensive use of loops and the often prominent presence of vinyl surface noise gave it a superficial gloss of glitch-pop electronica, despite the unusual sound source choices.

It found considerable critical favor, and when in response Schott began touring, she felt that performing with a laptop would be too sterile and uninteresting, and opted to work live with acoustic instruments. The ensuing The Golden Morning Breaks was assembled from original source material, and much less reliant on looped sounds.

Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves) is even sparer. My wonderful girlfriend observes that Erik Satie is perhaps the best touchpoint. I also hear some of Harry Partch’s fascination with the tonal qualities of unusual instruments, although Schott adds the dimension of manipulating the sound sources significantly after they are digitized. Since Schott’s compositions are assemblages, they don’t fetishize performance technique the way many “classical” recordings do. Her lack of “first chair” control over the clarinet (for example) imparts a certain unusual quality of fragility, (even, almost naivety) to her music.

Les Ondes Silencieuses has a very sculptural aspect. “Echoes and Coral” evokes images of moving slowly through some darkened, twisting gallery and seeing its bell notes revealed like hanging beacons as I turn corners. The concluding section of the baroque-influenced harpsichord piece “Le Labyrinthe,” despite its name, makes me think of circling a single, dense, complex, object and observing the play of light and shadow on its surface. (I noticed that when Schott talks about her creative process she sounds more than a little bit like my favorite sculptor, Sarah Sze)

Colleen’s music is often, but not always, pretty in a conventional, accessible, sense. There’s ample musical tension and discordance to keep it wll clear of new age/aural wallpaper territory. At its most intense, as on “Past the Long Black Land,” and “Le Bateau,” Schott’s viola de gamba even evokes a more stately version of John Cale’s mind-bending see-saws on “Black Angel’s Death Song.”

Throughout it’s a surprising, thoroughly rewarding musical experience and very highly recommended.

• Fancy recording equipment
• A rock-solid sense of timing
• Rabid perfectionism about the recording process
• Long songs

Here are some things that Dean Edward Wells does have:

• A prodigious bounty of catchy melodies and riffs
• A bevvy of quirky lyrics set to the former
• A pretty good singing voice
• A modicum of proficiency at the guitar,bass, and to a lesser extent, drums

Comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Mountain Goats are inevitable and not unwarranted. Sound quality-wise, Wells is maybe even closer to John Darnielle’s legendarily cantankerous boomboxes than Tobin Sprout’s four-track.

I spent a bunch of time making notes on these songs, trying to find the ones where peaks of performance competence and melodic genius overlapped (”Grapples and Orangutangs”, say), but then I realized that was fundamentally missing the point. The guitar solo of “The Icecaps of Mars (Are Just Copying Ours” has some cringingly bad notes, but it also has a giddy exuberance that multiple takes might have worn down, and quite a few exactly right notes. None of the instruments are quite in time with each other, but it still pretty much rocks. If you have trouble reconciling these thoughts, The Capstan Shafts really aren’t going to be for you.

Wells has released these three EPs (and the older “Haluluah Moancoaxers!” and “The Sun Don’t Get Things Done Without a Little Help from Everyone”) as Creative Commons licensed downloads at archive.org, so if you think you might dig it, you can find out with no more investment than a little bit of your time and bandwidth. (I had some trouble getting the MP4 files into iTunes and the tagging was weird; MediaCoder and mp3tag were very helpful).

If you decide you’re as much of a fanatic as I am, there’s a world of CDs, lovingly hand-assembled CDRs, casettes, and out-of-print rarities to track down from the likes of Abandoned Love Records, Asaurus Records, Beat the Indie Drum, Fall of the West records, Kittridge Records, Rainbow Quartz Records, Slight, and Yellow Mica Recordings. Happy hunting.