Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly

Imagine a younger incarnation of Badly Drawn Boy's Damon Gough, raised on Green Day and Dashboard Confessional, and you have a fair idea of what to expect from Sam Duckworth, the fresh-faced troubadour behind Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Like Gough, Duckworth is by turns breathtakingly brilliant and exasperatingly pretentious. Still, it's easy to see why his debut, The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager, arrives on a wave of hype. It's a striking mix of folk, emo, chamber pop, and even electronica, all navigated by Duckworth with a fearlessness worthy of his awkward nom de guerre.

Duckworth used to front a hardcore punk band, and he still sounds most comfortable belting out angsty midtempo tunes that could have come from an MTV Unplugged session. "I-Spy" and "Whitewash Is Brainwash" could just as easily be built around churning electric guitars instead of Duckworth's nimble acoustic work and DIY electronics. More interesting are songs like the jazzy "An Oak Tree" and the gorgeously melodic "Call Me Ishmael," one of several tunes that surprisingly and effectively adds a cornet and strings to the mix.

Duckworth is only 21, and as he matures, we can expect greater things from him than songs about girls who don't return phone calls ("War of the Worlds") and self-conscious navel-gazers like—wait for it—"If I Had £1 for Every Stale Song Title I'd Be 30 Short of Getting out of This Mess." For now, The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager is a disarmingly earnest, flawed, occasionally fascinating debut.

—Andy Hermann
04.05.07

Being that emo has now, in 2007, made itself a stable fixture in popular music, it makes sense that it has also begun to move even more from its emotional hardcore roots and into other musical trends like indie rock, pop, and in the case of Sam Duckworth (the man behind the rather cumbersomely named Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly), even a bit of orchestral pop, folk, and indie electronica. Despite these various influences, however, what the artist does on his debut, The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager, is not particularly different from the other vaguely introspective young singer/songwriters out there -- singer/songwriters who grew up listening to Saves the Day and Dashboard Confessional and Green Day -- with his plaintive, often monotonous and sometimes whiny vocals about becoming an adult, figuring life out, and falling in love. While Duckworth doesn't quite have the emotional talents of a, let's say, Chris Carrabba, he is convincing enough in his word choice and delivery, his mix of lightheartedness, intimate reflection, and societal criticism ("Do I turn every conversation and every contemplation I make into a self-pity trip?" he wonders in part two of the title song) to come across as a legitimate force. While his "let's try and enjoy life but also constantly reflect heavily upon it" message and simple acoustic guitar chords can get a little repetitive, and cliché (something, to be fair, he realizes: "I'm just trying to make you sing, and not be perplexed" he says on "I-Spy"), thanks to the added but never ornate instrumentation -- the cornet, the strings, the keyboards, the electronic beeps -- GC.WC.F manages to keep things on the album from blending into one another, manages to give each of the songs a separate identity. The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager is emo, but the fact that it has branched out from the customary definition of that means that it should attract a wider selection of (mostly teenaged) fans. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide