PhilPaine.com

This debut album was only released a few days ago, in the U.K., but I can safe­ly make the bet that it will be a big suc­cess. Close har­mo­ny vocals rem­i­nis­cent of Simon & Gar­fun­kle are com­bined with superb gui­tar play­ing and judi­cious­ly used bits of wood­wind (I think there’s a flugel­horn in there) and elec­tron­ics. The lyrics are real poet­ry. DCLC are list­ed as “exper­i­men­tal, folk, lounge”, which I sup­pose is fair enough, but is inad­e­quate to express the num­ber of nodes they con­nect to. Every song on the album, from the first, “Jeal­ous Ene­mies”, to the last, “Mir­a­cle Kick­er” shows an extra­or­di­nary crafts­man­ship, get­ting every lit­tle detail just right. “Robot Com­mand Cen­tre” and the pro­found­ly orig­i­nal “Spon­ta­neous Com­bus­tion Pact” in par­tic­u­lar had an emo­tion­al impact on me. This is intel­li­gent music.

Dark Cap­tain Light Cap­tain is a Lon­don-based band cur­rent­ly tour­ing the boonies in the U.K. —and I eager­ly antic­i­pate them break­ing out inter­na­tion­al­ly so they can show up here. I’ll be first in line for tick­ets when they play Toron­to. Dan Car­ney (gui­tar, voice), Giles Lit­tle­ford (gui­tar, voice), Neil Klein­er (elec­tron­ics, wood­wind, voice), Chin Of Britain (drums), Mike Cran­ny (bass, voice) Lau­ra Copsey (brass, voice), shown above, are the line-up.