Skip to main content

Possibly the Awesomest Band Ever [Arrrrgh, A Guest Post, Matey]


Guest blogger Parkcow is not afraid of Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew


I found the band thanks to a banner add for another musician. It was an electronica, indie chick who was actually pretty good (kind of like Imogen Heap, sort of, from Frou Frou—let’s say if Hooverphonic and Regina Spekter had a baby and Imogen Heap raised it).

Actually, after 13 years of using the internet (though I probably shouldn’t count the first two since that was when AOL was charging per minute so it’s not like I used the internet for anything but the high priority stuff: chat rooms and porn, and chat rooms about porn, of course), this was my FIRST purchase based on clicking through a banner add. I’m not sure if I’m the norm or not, but I don’t know how ANYONE makes money on the internet with that kind of year to purchases ratio.

Anyway, CD Baby, where I found Captain Dan, suggested that if I liked Echo Slightly, then I’d also like Captain Dan (and about five other artists). It should be noted that NONE of the artists they suggested were anything like the CD I purchased and, in fact, I quite disliked the other four artists (all metal-y, industrial funk type stuff that grated on my nerves more harshly than the musicians ham-fistedly grated on their instruments), but Captain Dan immediately drew my interest because the musicians were wearing pirate costumes.

I was immediately conflicted.

On the one hand, I’d learned a valuable lesson about trusting novelty bands to be any good by listening first to the Village People and then, even more disappointingly, to G.W.A.R. (and at this point I feel like mentioning that my baby is eating the wrist rest that usually sits in front of my keyboard. He gets immediately jealous when I sit at the computer and cries at the gate until I let him in, and now his favorite toy is the “jelly dong” wrist thingy I have. He’s chewing on it like he’s trying to crack a walnut and he cries when I take it away from him. God. Here’s to hoping whatever they put in jelly dongs isn’t toxic).

On the other hand, it was a PIRATE band! So I listened, and they were pretty good. They didn’t just dress like pirates, they sang like pirates too! (Oh, good. He dropped the wrist thing and is chewing on envelopes from the trash can now. Much better.) Being a 12 year old boy at heart, I found this incredibly entertaining.

The songs might not have much in the way of longevity for me—I’m guessing the novelty would wear off after about three listens—but I wholly support the concept of a pirate rap band. It does my old heart good to know that people are living the dream. The only thing that would be awesomer would be a ninja band. Actually, that might be kind of boring, which runs counter to the exciting ninja lifestyle. But ninjas would just sound like raspy, normal people—kind of like Bryan Adams but maybe a little less sucky. Maybe ninja robots would be better. Ninja pirates would have been the best, obviously, but now that pirates have been done it, it would just be a weird, hybrid tribute band, and nobody with any sense thinks those are cool. So, I guess I’ll just have to settle with the awesomeness of a pirate band, at least until I get bored with the music.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Celebrate Halloween with Peter Squires's New Video, "Witch"

I don't usually do festive or holiday posts. In fact, the closest I get is writing some kind of seasonal bent against a track, and only then when I've had too much coffee and can't find any relation to a song other than what the weather is doing. I just think holiday-themed posts / articles are lazy. But Halloween is different. Why? Because Halloween, to paraphrase Wesley Willis, whips a horse's ass. So when Ryan from The Musebox put me on to Peter Squires a few days ago, I knew it was going into the annals of Duck & Cover (that's right, I said "annals" on the Internets). From the Press Release: Peter’s direct and honest vocal delivery is reminiscent of contemporaries such as Kimya Dawson and Luke Temple. The album is all heart, laid bare for our aural pleasure. Woe Is Me was recorded in Peter Squires’ Brooklyn bedroom and is available on his website for fans to download at no charge. The first video from the album is “Witch” and it was just rele...

Lucero Video for "Darken My Door"

Darken My Door from Lucero on Vimeo . It's good to see that a serious band doesn't have to take itself seriously. Even better when a band's fans don't take them too seriously. "Darken My Door" off of Lucero's latest album, 1372 Overton Park , is a song about losing stuff--girlfriend, money, dignity. In fact, a lot of Lucero's songs are like that, but I'm not getting into that now. I'm talking about the video, which has so much to love. Obviously, I love the fact director Alex Mecum has used a puppet as the protagonist. But it's what the puppet does that makes this video so much fun. Puppet eating chili dogs, puppet drinking whiskey, puppet giving blow jobs . . . Hell, there's even puppet vomit! It's ridiculous, yes, but also tragic. By the end of the video, if you don't feel a little sorry for the scruffy faced whore puppet, then you have no soul. Here's a little more about the videos for Lucero's new album: To promot...

Flight of the Conchords Are Tha Muthaflippin'

If you go to the official Flight of the Conchords website , you will see that it was about the time they started work on their HBO special that they stopped updating. However, you will also read that they don’t mind too much. In fact, they are very quick to point to other fan sites that are doing a much better job. This self deprecating humour is part of what makes the duo so endearing. For those who have not yet seen the programme, Bret McKenzie ( formerly of Wellington dub band The Black Seeds) plays the naïve Bret, who is a vertible emotional rollercoaster when compared to the dour-faced Jermaine (Jermaine Clement. See him in Eagle vs. Shark ). Together they look for gigs and . . . well that’s pretty much it: they look for gigs. But it’s enough. Just because the show’s premise isn’t robust, doesn’t mean the show falls flat. Hell, remember Seinfeld? That was a show supposedly about ‘nothing,’ and look how well it did. FOTC is at least about one thing, so it’s got that much more ...