08.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly
The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager

This really is a masterful album. The band is actually one guy, Sam Duckworth. He plays (‘creates’) everything on the album. Whilst Sam comes from Stoke, his sound has much in common with current trends in music in the mid-west of America and Canada (you know: Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, The Hotel Alexis, Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, etc etc). There is a mixture of folk, laptop effects, and piano led pop. Every track brims with ideas and passion. Sam’s lyrics are brilliantly polemic and directed, but never preachy or excessively overt. The music does the talking, but the messages are there if you want to find them, and they are all positive. It sickens me that this man is still only 20. Highlights are the track ‘Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly’ (a very soft attack on globalisation) and the superb ‘Call Me Ishmael’, but, in reality, that amounts to picking gold out from a bag of gold. Wonderful, and, again, would be a top three contender most years.