I’ve had this Capgun Coup album sitting in my review pile for a while now, and boy… I’ve struggled with what I oughta say about it. I mean, it jumps all over the place between noise, sound collages, songs that often don’t have apparent melodies until the third or fourth listens… all sandwiched between the occasional pop gem. But then, just as I was considering passing this album off to another reviewer to see what they could make of it, a word jumped out at me from their press release: schizophrenic. Perfect!

Capgun Coup’s Brought To You By Nebraskafish sounds exactly like it what is: four bandmates with equal amounts of input, and next to no hero-worship or reverence for obvious indie-rock stalwarts. It seems that these guys just wanted to make up songs that were fun to play, be it at a small club or a house party and didn’t bother concerning themselves with all that peripheral crap.

It’s a good thing too, as there’s a lot to love on this album, but you’re gonna have to work for it. To prove my case, the band was actually so concerned about how their earliest acoustic compositions would sit next to their louder, more erratic work that they often make soundbyte collages to join the tracks together. The odd part is that these portions (which only read in negative numerical sequence on your CD player, mind you) don’t really help much at all with bringing the songs together in any unified way, instead making the minimalistic stuff like “Oh, My Mod” stick out like a sore thumb, while noisy workouts a la “A Liar In Texas In A Greeen Room In Memphis” seem more like where the group wants to be overall. If that makes sense, which it probably won’t until you’ve spun this record about eighty times.

Uh huh. The discordant and noisy stuff like “Social Security Number” – complete with it’s ‘Oh my God / He’s got the fattest rod” chorus – doesn’t even mesh with the equally dissonant yet quiter strains of stuff like “Time” on Brought To You By Nebraskafish, but I’m not sure that it’s supposed to. Ultimately, this record could be a really great starting point for one of the most exciting experimental indie-rock groups we’ll se in the upcoming years. And then again, they could also self-destruct under the weight of explaining away their own creations. Either way, Nebraskafish plays out like a musical Rorschach test… at the end of the day, Capgun Coup is whatever the listener thinks that they are. Good enough.

Capgun Coup - My Tears Cure Cancer.mp3
Capgun Coup - Oh My Mod.mp3
Capgun Coup - Bobby Chops And The Do-Gooders.mp3

Order a copy of Brought To You By Nebraskafish from Team Love!