Listen In!
The last few days have been uncharacteristically gloomy down here at girlpants’ South Florida HQ: overcast, drizzly and generally headache-inducingly heavy on “cold” fronts and whatnot. I spent most of the weekend holed up in my cubicle with a bottle of Excedrin and my headphones, playing Selected Ambient Works II and my entire collection of Biosphere records in hopes that they’d drive the demons away. Wouldn’t you know it, Monday comes and it’s a beautiful day–of course, I have to spend the day inside at work. But the sun was shining inside the GPHQ as well, you see–Monday was the day that I discovered the sunniest band in recent memory.
The Capes are a synthpop outfit from South London. They’ll probably be getting a lot of press for their relationship with Bloc Party, but what they should really get attention for is their razor-sharp melodies and general catchiness. Their songs are chock-full of bouncy vocals, bright synths, and skittery guitars that recall just about everyone in the British pop scene over the last fifteen or twenty years, from XTC to Blur to (yes) Bloc Party.
The band’s official site offers three mp3s from their debut album Hello, including standout “Supergirls” and nearly equally catchy traxxx “Firstbase” and “Shinjuku Hi 5″ (revealing maybe a little JPop fetish). Review sites like Popmatters and Prefixmag have pretty much trashed the band as derivative and too samey, but I can’t see that being the case based on these sample tracks. Maybe the entire album will reveal a crippling weakness, but I kind of doubt it. (Delusions of Adequacy, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty cool.)
Anyway, here’s “Carly (Goddess of Death)”, another track from the album that’s been making its rounds on teh internets. It’s the first Capes song I heard and is still by far my favorite, in no small part due to a sound that slides in somewhere between Blur and the Libertines at their most playful.
You can buy the album direct from the label or on Amazon.com. Yes, they have a myspace.
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