| Jeremy Aaron |
04/14/10 02:40 AM |
AP.net Remembers: Cap'n Jazz
Where's Weekly Nostalgia? Well, it hasn't exactly gone anywhere. We just beefed it up and gave it this new name. We'll still be paying tribute to those bands that made up the soundtrack for your high school summers, but we didn't want to limit ourselves to the recently departed. Rest assured that each week, we'll be shining the spotlight on a band from yesteryear that's shaped the music of today. Few bands exemplify humble beginnings spawning something hugely influential quite like Cap'n Jazz. I mean here's a band that contained both Tim and Mike Kinsella (who pretty much are Midwestern indie-rock) and Davey Von Bohlen (from a little band we've featured in this spot called The Promise Ring). Now, being an antecedent for greatness doesn't really imply anything (I imagine even I must have had an ancestor somewhere along the line who was a douchebag), Cap'n Jazz's music, however little of it there was-- just a single full-length and a few singles and miscellaneous tracks were all they produced, most of which appear on the Analphabetapolothology collection-- is more than satisfying. Their chaotic, messy tunes and fly-off-the-hinges rhythms might take the non-initiated some time to get used to, but no band sounded like they had as much fun making music as Cap'n Jazz. It's pretty safe to say that no one else could have pulled off a ramshackle cover of A-Ha's "Take On Me", turning a piece of vintage schmaltz into some fractured and utterly exuberant noise that's infinitely more entertaining than the polished original. And speaking of nostalgia, even if their music never filled your old playlists, Cap'n Jazz sound so completely youthful, it's hard to listen to their songs and not be transported to a better (or at least different) time, when living for the minute was all you knew, when the past and future didn't weigh on your mind in the least. And if that doesn't do it for you, well, at least they've got a song called "Little League". |
