Capricorn is a series of self-interruptive vignettes, which defamiliarise the known world to forge one of their own. This album’s composition followed a severe panic attack, after which Trevor Powers—and his instruments and recording equipment—retreated for a month to a remote cabin in Idaho. Self-imposed exile is almost a clichéd part of the songwriting process at this point: I’ve heard some refer to it as “doing a Bon Iver”. But the results here, a wonderfully isolated and singular LP, speak for themselves.
There’s an ordered chaos to Capricorn which feels like channel-hopping. The album fully develops its every idea, but discards them the second it does so. Songs disrupt and disorient in a similar way to Macintosh Plus’ ‘Sick & Panic’, forming shapes too angular and spiky to hold. Miraculously, Powers herds these ideas into one barn: what holds Capricorn together is its mysterious and muggy timbre. Production throughout suggests a spectral presence; a constant intrusion of the past. It’s as though radio transmissions are trying to puncture the album’s surface, or that it’s being played on a turntable whose needle is pommelled with dust.
Through this chaos, Powers permits more than a few moments of beauty. When these moments do arrive, such as in the conclusion of ‘Earth to Earth’, they come unannounced. Powers makes mention of “our digital coma” in his notes for Capricorn—and these sudden bursts of sublime melody are like a defibrillation. The shock widens the eyes, opens the ears and shakes loose the dust of apathetic modern living.
Powers refers in the same notes to “ancient folklore”. This is most obviously felt through the album’s traditional instrumentation. But it also points to something deeper: the performative nature of folklore and its ritual traditions. Evidence of these concepts can be felt in ‘The Riverine’, whose mantra-like repetition and Koto styling suggests a theatre of the everyday—an extension of the idea of “coma” in which we apathetically float down channels of masked life.
There’s no doubting Powers’ credentials at this point (these self-titled projects following years working as Youth Lagoon), but it’s still worth mentioning how well-conceived and confident Capricorn is. Powers’ work is bolstered by stellar mixing and mastering, courtesy respectively of Jason Kingsland and Heba Kadry. The sound is clear to the extent that you’ll be looking over your shoulder, convinced that somewhere among the scrapes and thunks, something in your house fell over. There’s great use of space, too; ‘A New Name’ is vast and mysterious, like it was recorded in the same bat-packed cave as Björk’s ‘Cover Me’.
The real showstopper is ‘2166’, the album’s final track, whose vocals are so heavily post-processed they sound like a droplet of water skidding round in an oily pan. Beneath them is a piano line dying in distortion, and slow, quiet, laboured breathing. The track has an elegiac, sad sense of finality. It’s the perfect note on which to end an album that invigorates throughout, on both an emotional and a formal level.
Capricorn is available for purchase and streaming here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe