Martin Carr spent the 1990s writing songs and playing guitar for the Boo Radleys, one of the most idiosyncratic bands ever to be lumped in with the Britpop thing, a movement they really weren't a part of. Their Wake Up! LP scored them a couple of hits, but it's the previous record, Giant Steps that really showed Carr's incredible scope as a writer. He could do catchy blasts of sunshine, dub freakouts, noise opuses, straight-ahead rock, and intentional kitsch with equal aplomb.
His solo career after the band split in 1999, carried out primarily under the stage name Brave Captain, has embraced a similar eclecticism-- Carr's last album under that name, the 2006 free download Distractions, was loaded with electronic textures and even some decent rap courtesy of Akira the Don. His first album under his given name is more of a back-to-basics thing. It's as friendly as Wake Up! and the Boo's Kingsize, but also more stripped down and intimate. It could just be that Carr is writing these songs for himself to sing-- he wrote songs for Sice Rowbottom to sing with the Radleys, and though they have similar-sounding voices, Sice was more at home belting and yelping, while Carr prefers a very English sort of understatement.
Opener "The Dead of Winter" could be a leftover from Carr's mid-90s heyday-- it sounds familiar the second time you hear it, like it's been with you for years. It features a tumbling vocal melody, blasting horn theme, frantic drums and nasty guitar break that keeps you guessing which sides Carr is going to show on the rest of the record. Mostly, he shows his quiet side on brooding songs such as the dark, undulating "Tired, Broken, Black and Blue" and the slow crawl "Pontcanna Stone", where he gets in a haunting lead guitar part that drifts through the song as though some part of it were smoldering, giving off waves of heat. The album's six-minute centerpiece, "Goldrush '49", is built up from a few simple acoustic guitar phrases to a long, stretched-out chant of nothing but the word "California".
Carr can still deploy an easy melodicism seemingly at will, as the late-album duo "Orpheus Lament" and "Running" demonstrate. He gives one of the best songs to his wife, Mary, to sing. "Why You Gotta Bring Me All This Rain?" is one of those awesome, miserable British slow songs that inevitably makes you feel better about things after listening to it. Though it lacks the conscious ambition and open challenge of his best work, Ye Gods (And Little Fishes) is still a very pleasing album, and Carr is way past the point where he needs to open up a bag of tricks to make impressive music. If you and Carr last communicated when he was still a Boo Radley, this might be a good time to get re-acquainted, and if you've followed the Brave Captain through every stage of his voyage, you'll certainly want to take this opportunity to get to know him on a more personal level.
