The mastery of understatement is incredibly hard. To create a subtlety that doesn’t immediately invite pretension is equally difficult. Capulet has achieved something quite wonderful in their new release The World Is A Tragic World, But There Is Grace, So, Attend To The Grace because it segues the listener into a beautiful lull, a melancholy of gracefully bitten structure. Teethmarks scattered around an shining-seed apple core.
The press release itself sites Slint as an influence and you can see why; the scapes built by Capulet are sparse and rolling, tender like a lover’s hand but full of a tragedy. The title is apt if long. It’s arrhythmia of beats are neither disconcerting nor comforting and the waves of guitar are like fitful dreams. Its chord changes in the later songs are fretful and angry, sharp and at odds with its gentility. But only for a moment. The lovers argument ends and the band continue to dream. Albeit a dream that is not wholly happy.
It’s an uncompromising and experimental construct (although this experiment has been conducted before) and the construction leaves you quite contemplative. Somehow it manages to create a music that can be entirely personal to the listener as well as very obviously being personal to the creators. Predominantly this is due to the vocal arrangements (or lack thereof). The vocals come in easily even though a full 12 minutes of the album has passed by and have only a few words to impart before they go and stay gone. It’s a nice change. It allows you to listen without being told what to listen for.
Like Papa M’s Live From A Shark Cage this album is a waking dream. Like Mogwai is creates more than just the sum of the movements. The album as a whole is like the moments you find yourself being pulled from sleep, dozing through imaginings and finding memories you thought you had lost.
Capulet oficial website
Capulet on myspace
