Looking Back: Cap'n Jazz

Although it’s not a new release- and album (technically a compilation) that’s been on my mind is Cap’n Jazz’s 1998 compilation of all their released music- Analphabetapolothology. If you haven’t heard Cap’n Jazz, they’re pretty much the essence of teenagerdom, condensed into a sloppy, loud, and often euphoric mess of jazzy post-hardcore.

            The music of Cap’n Jazz, particularly in the amateurish vocal delivery of Tim Kinsella (Owls, Joan of Arc) have a strange quality of inducing intense nostalgia, in particular, the track We are Scientists! with its feverish, swelling group chorus and the strange, discordant French horn running through the track is almost guaranteed to leave the listener reminiscing on the summer nights of their teens in a much more interesting, involving way than looking through old textbooks. Musically, the band did quiet-loud dynamics in a way that was new and exciting, with a hardly audible bassline accompanied by hushed whispers bursting into a frenetic, spastic mess of atonal yelling and distorted guitars without a moment’s notice, and then quietly fizzling back out.

            The compilation, like any other, does have its low-points too- some songs simply don’t say as much as others; none of the tracks on this album are ‘bad’ per se, it’s just that they don’t have quite the same ability to provoke such intense feelings as the best tracks on this album. All in all, it’s an eclectic, nostalgic hardcore record with plenty of material and definitely worth hearing if you haven’t already.
FFO: American Football, Title Fight, Braid