And so it was that East London alt-folk collective Dark Captain (formerly dark Captain Light Captain) called it a day in 2012 following the release of their second critically lauded long-player, its members having dispersed to embark upon new projects. Thankfully, the band’s main creative force, Dan Carney has emerged with Astronauts, with a debut album that features all of the hallmarks that made Dark Captain such an intriguing and captivating act.
If ‘Dead Legs and Alibis’ saw Carney and co expanding the sound in terms of depth and fullness, ‘Hollow Ponds’ represents something of a return to the more stripped-back feel of ‘Miracle Kicker’ and instead expands in other directions, incorporating more electronic elements, and also more electric guitars.
As lead single ‘Skydive’ demonstrated, Carney’s approach to composition remains fundamentally unchanged, with delicately picked cyclical guitar refrains gradually being overlayed with additional layers of instrumentation. It’s all done extremely subtly, at times almost imperceptibly, with none of the nagging motifs that enter the mix coming to dominate, meaning the tracks build and build: the effect is cumulative and instead of battering the listener round the head with a barrage of extraneous noise, it slowly draws you in until you’re completely immersed without realising exactly when or how it happened.
Biographical detail often seems an intrusion or otherwise redundant, but the creation of ‘Hollow Ponds’ centres around Carney sustaining a badly fractured leg, the album being penned during his period of incapacity and recuperation. Listening to the album, you develop an image of a man alone with his thoughts, confined to a fracture ward and dosed up on morphine while picking through a host of emotions and festering grievances in a semi-delirious state, frustration simmering beneath the surface as he dreamed of regaining mobility – both physical and mental. Everything takes curious flight on the songs contained herein, and the atmosphere is magical,hazy, dream-like.
As with Carney’s previous output, the lyrics are often elliptical, the mood decidedly downbeat, the dreamy melodies countered by a deep-seated sense of resignation. The desire to run, for freedom, to escape, recur time and again across the 10 songs that make up ‘Hollow Ponds.’ There’s something wry in Carney’s delivery and execution, too. On the mesmeric ‘Everything’s a System, Everything’s a Sign’, which sees a ‘popcorn’ electro bleep and nostalgic brass provide unusual sonic counterpoints, he abandons the verse chorus structure for an eternal refrain of ‘you can’t just do what you like’, that seems to deliberately undermine his own observation as he harmonises loosely with himself and ends abruptly.
There’s a sense of bitterness and anger that creeps in, too. On ‘Vampires’, the album’s first overtly ‘rock’ track, driven by a crunchy guitar riff chugging out an unusual chord sequence and underpinned by a bolshy bass, he sings knowingly ‘Show some style, ‘cause they’ll leave you here to die in no time / Show some vision, show some pride, ‘cause they’ll tear you open wide... They’re vampires’. The manic piano that floats around in the background only adds to the tension.
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It’s all about contrasts and conflict: ‘Flame Exchange’ may present itself as being lyrically upbeat , but there’s uncertainty and hesitation: the delivery is lugubrious and cheerless as you like and the string section practically weeps as it hangs in the atmosphere. The hypnotic title track – the first of three which extend beyond the six-minute mark – is built around a woozy backwards string/synth drone and finds carney turn his gaze inward, and he’s as critical of himself as anyone:‘I’ve been too uncaring / and too long confused / too long standing like a statue now / too scared to move’. ‘Try to Put it Out of Your Mind’ is one of the album’s breeziest tracks, but the noodly, doodly electo whistle is ultimately swamped in a swell of rumbling noise that suggests anything but harmony.
The seven-minute ‘Openside’ marks an immense leap in terms of Carney’s sonic palette, an out-and-out rock tune in the vein of The God Machine (whose Robin Proper-Sheppard produced the first Dark Captain EP) and Eight Storey Window. Out of a maelstrom of swirling guitar emerges a nagging guitar line and thumping bass and Carney cuts loose, again alluding to his own position and further afield in a single couplet: ‘With no more broken bones and no more forces unknown / there’s no more empires to overthrow so let it come down so slow....’ He pulls off the role of angst-laden alt-rocker with remarkable aplomb and conviction, and as a welter of noise deluges over the mid-section, there’s an elating sense of liberation, of catharsis.
Astronauts can be everything Dark Captain were, and more, and ‘Hollow Ponds’ is simultaneously confident and introspective, ponderous and accomplished. Closer ‘Slow Days’ is quiet, personal, intense in its bareness – six minutes of little but Carney and an acoustic guitar, singing quietly, close to the mic. It’s an achingly magnificent song, simple but of so effective, as a mournful piano follows the chords and the vocals disappear into the distance.
Immaculately conceived and executed, ‘Hollow Ponds’ is an album that feels intensely personal and resonates on so many levels. Dark Captain my be gone, but Astronauts have truly launched.
Astronauts Online
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