Kill The Captains
Fun Anxiety

Cover art for Fun Anxiety by Kill The Captains Description: CD on Armellodie
Format: CD
Genre(s): Indie Rock
Label: Armellodie
Price:
£7.19
Availability: In stock. Dispatched in 1 working day.

4Rating: 4
...according to our on 22 April 2010.

I've never really felt anxious about having fun. I once felt anxious about sellotaping a frog to my shoulder, but I got through it. I was young and foolish then, I feel old and foolish now. This four-piece's new album is a taut sounding slick record that pushes the emotive indie rock button and never lets up. It has a really sweet sound and the musicianship's equally sweet. It has an experimental side that should sit well with some folks. Some moments are quite epic sounding and if you are a fan of Appleseed Cast or maybe Itch then you should bum this.

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Sound clips for Fun Anxiety by Kill The Captains: on CD at Norman Records UK. CD, Armellodie, ARM11, £7.19.

What their label says...

Fun Anxiety – A condition known to afflict members of rock combination group Kill The Captains, born from a sense that everyone is having fun without them. Symptoms include leaving conversations hanging because your neighbour’s conversation sounds more interesting, a pathological refusal to go to bed despite the fact that everyone else went to bed days ago, a phobia of clowns.
Related forms: Funmnesia

Armellodie is delighted to present the lip-smacking debut album from Sheffield’s finest wonky-pop albinos, Kill the Captains with ‘Fun Anxiety’.

Hailing from “the largest village in England” and brought up to work hard and play hard Kill the Captains are an industrious bunch of buxom comrades. By day the band runs its own recording studio and rehearsal facilities, ‘Red Cloud’ and by night they promote their own indie-tastic and very successful club-night, ‘Mutiny’.  Having debuted with their eponymous EP in 2008 and fresh from recent shows with Johnny Foreigner and Acoustic Ladyland, the band has developed into a ferocious live act with a burgeoning reputation for riotous performances.  Their debut long-player is steeped in elements of drone rock, new-wave pop, and suspense-filled Rock’n’Roll, with shout-along choruses, fizzing dual-guitars and propulsive rhythmic skulduggery.

Fun Anxiety opens with the bestial themed couplet of Santino and Spot the Leopard - the former a true story about a chimpanzee that briefly became a minor scientific phenomenon. It was observed that he gathered objects from within his enclosure in a Swedish zoo, and whittled them into missiles that he could direct at the daily crowds who gawped and pointed. Scientists who studied him professed that his ability to plan demonstrated distinctly human characteristics: he was methodical, he scheduled his attacks, he sought to maximise the deadly potential of his weapons of choice. He was castrated for his initiative.

The epic whirr of The Yellow Brush and Missing Canoeist, are seductively dangerous and clearly define the bands shared love of all things shoegaze and krautrock!  Where as Rope highlights Leon Carter’s intelligent and emotive lyrics accompanied by some beautiful arpeggio guitars -“Don’t act too smart, don’t have an opinion, and don’t lift your head above the parapet.”

Recent single Rummy, is a counter-kilter barn stomper which showcases the band’s quintessentially British sense of humour cutting bitter lyrical swathes against the slobbering uber-Neanderthal - “Came down from the treetops, knuckles still dragging” - the type who steals your wife whilst closing the deal on the insurance you never wanted - “Learnt a string of pleasantries and never stopped smiling”. Like all great rock stompers it perfectly pairs a classic and memorable melody with foot-tap-inducing scuzzy guitars.

Lebanese and Clovers provide a sonic shoulder to cry on, the audio equivalents of holding your hand and giving you a cuddle. The same could not be said for House Band At The Asylum, befitting it’s moniker in the nuttiest of fashions.

The album scales dizzying proportions on Cellar Dweller when a measured sermon in the opening verses soon spills into prophetic declaration and the band unleash the 4 horses of apocalypse, galloping and converging into a crescendos beneath layer upon layer of ever thickening blankets of sound, but what less would you expect from a song written from the perspective of a survivalist ensconced in his underground panic room, ruminating on the impending destruction of the world.

Closing with the stunning Harper’s Call, this is the kind of song you imagine couples coming together, gazing at each other adoringly. Management then turn the lights on but the DJ lets it play out. The couples dance. The music ends. Eyes are locked in their embrace.

Kill the Captains are Leon Carter, Paul Pickavance, Giles Robinson and Paul Andrew Collins Esquire. You can’t ration fun.