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Captain Phoenix
There's a fashion in British music just now to holster a sense of arrogance as though manifesting some self-proclaimed belief you're the messiah and saviour of the scene, and then there's people who are outwardly, temptingly offered the industry via a back door and yet reject it favouring the vigour of their music alone as a leading torch to eminence.
A band very much an example of the latter is Captain Phoenix, esteemed for building a strapping and resolute fan-base not from the potential lights of being related by drumsticks and blood to Razorlight, but with their dominant combination of the essence of what music is about in 2007.
With a degree of instant pop approval in the familiar shape of View-like harmonies and grousing, restless vocals, they have stunningly escalated the progression of British indie by stapling themselves into the tapestry of where the scene is swaying with an imaginative foresight for melody.
They've got a rugged, almost stripped down, sense of 70s folk rock which is displayed not just in the Larrikin Love esque drumming of 'Living On The Guestlist', but in the Kooks indicative voice behind it all, the strained poetry and valour of an effortless sound and the ease at which they can express a fundamental understanding of the new generation. This song, like 'Same Old Story' has a wave of scenester-friendly familiarity but without the abhorrent egotism that it would often escort, making them far more believable and treasured than a lot of other similar bands in the charts, unjustifiably hype-fuelled.
At moments the guitars grind, fluorescent and psychedelically imposing, gathering the Americana vocals with the frequent instants of genre resisting arrangements, while in other places falling into a recognizable unification of acoustic simplicity and unproblematic melody. In essence they're the perfect assembly for everybody who has a love for the best contemporary bands but has a feeling of detachment from the sincerity of them all, wanting to believe what they're being sang while thoroughly havening every twitchy and enthusing beat, hook and absorbing synchronization of the two.
These lads are the real trend, having built a reputation on their own backs for unendingly decreeing a ruthless and demanding collective of old versus new compositions, they've got the heroism of the people behind them and the writing talent to back up their ascendant popularity, and are certainly worthy of anybody's investigative time.
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