Album Review: Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly – Young Adult


Adult



Sam Duckworth stopped using the Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly name several years ago, possibly because of the associations it brought him with a mid-noughties scene which one way or another also gave rise to the likes of Lily Allen, Kate Nash and Jack Penate – but hey, we’re in 2018 and now it’s back, from outer space.

Maybe he now feels the reverse is true and that people are pining for times which even a decade ago seemed so much simpler – he also anniversary-toured his debut The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager a couple of years ago – but if this all feels a bit Blackberry Messenger, Young Adult is a record living philosophically at least very much in the moment.

Given that the singer is now in his early thirties, the title’s connotations seem more allusive, its vigour aimed at a generation frustrated with the growing gap in aspirations for society between young and old, and the rise of extremism this is fuelling.

This breakdown in communication is dissected lyrically on opener Adults, and then handled even more explicitly on DNA: “Something in my DNA/defines my attitude/this nation’s a foreign land/when you don’t share a common view”, both songs delivered in a major key lilt which gives them a strangely nostalgic, open mic texture.

Ten different, but really the same entreaties to invisible revolution, all told in Duckworth’s slightly nasal estuary patois, would probably be a too sugary a brew for most. Wisely though he chooses to flesh out his acoustic guitar with the occasional flourish of brass and organ on Just A Phase and Invisible, although on the former he nearly spoils it all by brazenly rhyming Nostradamus with pyjamas.

A cheerful concession to naff which keeps furrowed brows at bay, and going places others won’t, is you sense a defining quality for someone raised in working class Southend; the nous to not take anything too seriously despite an obvious commitment to politics lies at the heart of his appeal. This adventurousness helps Young Adult to escape the cliché of being the millennial agit prop of a dewy-eyed troubadour – and the risks and rewards of it are divulged equally on the scuzzy VHS Forever and Animate, the former a clumsy, OTT rallying call whilst the latter picks a warmer path through Duckworth’s by now familiar existentialist angst.

There is an inner strength required in someone to being me, myself and I as an artist, especially for a character who wears so much on their sleeve. With that in mind much of Young Adult straddles the inevitable chasm between telling and being open, a dichotomy from which it saves itself by employing traditionally genuine British values like self-deprecation and honest good humour.

Whatever he chooses to call himself on stage, Sam Duckworth remains more of a law unto himself than to others, making music looking for a better way but still as conflicted as any superhero.

(Andy Peterson)


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