Captain Horizon

A review featuring Captain Horizon at the New Disorder Festival has been published on nottinghamlive.co.uk. Thank you to Harry Paterson for his extremely kind words!

The unique blend of alt, prog, classic rock, indie and unashamedly glorious pop that constitutes Captain Horizon’s songs is clearly made for enormadomes and for a mesmerising half-hour period, the MFN was transformed into the California Bowl.

You can read the full review of the day here.

Photography by Sue Paterson.

Download the free online only ‘El Nibre EP’ from our shop!

The El Nibre EP is a free release of 4 tracks recorded during the Radiostasis sessions. We’re working on an album of new songs, but it felt wrong to abandon these ones. “Turn Away” is a fast paced but sparse rocker that alternates between threadbare verses and mammoth choruses. The title track “El Nibre” is possibly the heaviest and most frantic thing we’ve ever done, telling the story of a mythical monster/force of nature. “Climbing the Waterfall” has been a live favourite over the last year, the end of the song usually finds Whitty at the top of whatever he was able to scale in 4 1/2 minutes.

The final track, Strong Enough, is a song we’ve gone to town on. The original idea came 5 years ago, some songs just take their god damned time. We’ve not played it live much, and it’s a bit different to what we normally do, but put this on headphones late at night and sit back with a beer/ smoke/ herbs/ whisky.

We hope you enjoy this free release, leave your comments below!

In light of the fact that we’re now working on our debut album, and also that we recorded ten songs when working on our last EP, Radiostasis, we’ve come to a decision. We’re going to put up a special treat for our fans very soon – a free, online-only EP!

This will consist of four songs we recorded during the Radiostasis sessions, three of which fans of Captain Horizon will hopefully be very familiar with, and one only die-hards and the psychotically devoted will really know, since we’ve hardly ever played it live – in fact we have never played it live in its current form.

As we whispered lovingly into your ears during the course of our last update, we want our first album to hang together as an album rather than just be a sort of browny-greyish song-porridge of stuff that happened to land on a disc. But we thought these four songs, which basically share no theme apart from being played by the same hands, feet and vocal cords, were pretty bloody good. What in hell’s name will we do with them, we thought. We want people to hear them, we thought.

Onto the website with them, we thought.

Track listing:

Climbing The Waterfall
El Nibre
Turn Away
Strong Enough

These will all be available as a free download as of Monday the 19th September!

Fair question. Well, we came to a startling conclusion a couple of months ago: We’ve been trying to have our cake and eat it. As an unsigned band, you have a very finite amount of time in which to practice the set you’re going to play at your next gig, AND write some new songs which don’t suck turgid bullglans. We’ve probably been guilty in the past of slightly rushing new songs purely because we got excited and wanted to play them live as soon as possible.

This in turn meant that perhaps we weren’t totally happy with every aspect of the songs we’d written before we unleashed it on the public for the first time. There were moments onstage where we’d try something brand new that we were sure would be immense. Sometimes it was immense. Sometimes it fell flat and we took it back to the practice room. Most songs DID get finished… just not until we’d been playing them live for 3 months. Some have been quietly abandoned and put to pasture to be fattened up and eaten by ravenous song ravens.

We thought if we threw them some songs and then hid, they might leave us alone.

So we’ve decided for the next batch of songs, which will one day be an album, we’re not playing any of them live at all until they’re ready.

Yes, “Will one day be an Album”. We’re making an album. Captain Horizon are making an album. Right now.

We could have released the songs we’ve already got as an album. We love them and stand by them, but it doesn’t feel right – one of the things we enjoy about playing in our band is that we don’t think of ourselves as Rock, Metal, Indie, whatever… And the songs we’ve written up ‘til now have gone through different phases as we’ve worked out who we are as a band. We don’t think they’d make sense on the same CD.

So here’s what we’re doing…

The Album:

Josh (guitar/backing vocals) had a few days off work a while back. Some of us, handed a two week stretch without anything firm to do, would complain about the loss of earnings, lie in until past noon and then loop continuously between masturbation, console gaming and the eating of crisps. Perhaps we’d rediscover a level of alcohol intake physically impossible to the gainfully employed. Perhaps we’d start actually taking sides while watching Jeremy Kyle.

No reason for this photo, I just think it's fucking cool.

The J-man steered clear of these occupations, admirable though they may be: he started going through every song idea, riff or fragment of melody he could find among the hundreds he’d recorded on his mobile phones over the past 4 years. By the time he went back to work, he had thirty song ideas. We’ve been working on them for the last couple of months, building band arrangements, deciding which ones have legs, and trying to go somewhere new with our sound.

As I write this, we’ve got something like thirteen songs in the kind of condition where until recently, we’d have played them live. But we’re holding them close to our chest for now.

What are the new songs like? Well, they’re a bit more varied than we’ve done in the past. One or two are heavy enough to sink Kent. Some are pretty enough to move old men to tears. Some are a bit proggy. Some are sweet but simple. We’ll keep you updated on our progress as we go along!

Alex

Captain Horizon

Friday 15th April 2011 – Captain Horizon release the follow up to our debut EP ‘Radiostasis’!

This will be your first chance to get your hands on a copy of Captain Horizon’s new EP, Radiostasis. That’s right; after 6 months of hard work, it’s finally here!

To celebrate, we’re headlining The Temple at the HMV Institute, Digbeth, Birmingham and we’d love to see you there to join in the fun at an absolutely superb venue, with immense sound and a fantastic stage. Arguably the finest venue which still supports unsigned talent, in fact.

Track listing for the new EP as follows:

1. Stop!
2. Bring Back the Sun
3. Anxiety Breaks Us All
4. Radiostasis

At this show we’ll be pulling out all the stops in what promises to be the biggest, most important gig we’ve ever done. It’s going to be an overwhelming display of everything we’ve been working towards for the last year.

Yes, the stakes are high. So come along and help us by catching Whitty when he jumps the barrier! We’ll be taking to the stage at around 9.45pm!

The first 200 copies of the EP will be available in hard copy CD format for £3 each. After the first 200 are gone, the EP will be sold at £5 as we’re getting full litho printed replication carried out! Get your hands on one of the limited edition first pressings and own a piece of history!

Check out the facebook event. Links for online stores will be out within the next 24/48 hours. You can check out the preview of the EP on last.fm.

You can also check out the peformance of the Radiostasis EP from BBC Radio WM Introducing on the BBC iPlayer.

Also, check out Whitty’s interview in the Birmingham Mail today!

We've yet to read it ourselves. Hopefully he's not said anything too offensive.

News

0 Live Review – New Disorder Festival

1 El Nibre EP Released!

0 Free Online EP Announced!

0 What the Hell are We Doing?

0 Radiostasis EP – Out Now!