Captain Of The Lost Waves: Beautiful Ugly (2024) – mini-review
UK artist Captain Of The Lost Waves is out with the album “Beautiful Ugly”, and as is customary for the musical exploits of the good captain the music explores landscapes that are a tad difficult to place inside of any specific niche of music. In this case the songs are ethereal creations through and through, where gentle acoustic folk music inspired guitars are backed by orchestral overlays into a blissful symphonic variety of dream pop, and where the vocals soar up high to emphasize the light toned, ethereal qualities of the moods and atmospheres explored. With occasional drops in vocal tone and melody when required of course, the captain has a good vocal range and makes sure to use it all on this album. The keyboards used and what I suspect may be real string instruments at times too also adds a little bit of a cosmic quality to these landscapes, adding a bit of an otherworldly allure to the already compelling arrangements. In some way one might describe this album as a sophisticated and elegant variety of pop/rock music, but explored in a manner that probably will resonate among those fond of the more accessible and ambient flavored varieties of progressive rock too. For my sake I’d say that at least on some levels I do get associations to the older albums by Irish artist Enya in this case, and I suspect that quite a few who find her creations to be generally intriguing will be equally fascinated with the ethereal landscapes conjured by the Captain on this occasion.
by Olav Martin Bjørnsen