The new album from Select Captain, aka Dane Kristian Gaarskjaer, starts as impressively as you could wish with the slow and stately Fit. With just a piano for accompaniment Gaarskjaer intones lyrics with serious emotional heft and power. The title track follows in the same intense vein, although there’s an anthemic chorus with some serious orchestration to get into and it’s a genuinely uplifting song (regardless of the lyrics).
The remaining eight songs are in a (relatively) lighter vein but no less powerful. “Straight No Chaser” has a spaghetti western echo to it with keening vocals while the delicate and heartfelt Miles Apart, a duet with Soluma Somay, is quietly lovely. A change of pace comes with the vibrant and almost rocky Ordinary Greed before normal service is resumed with La-di-da, which with its affirmative lyrics and refrain of “I just won’t let you down” is a song to snuggle up to. Things end with Out In Space And In Between, musically a companion to the opener and a perfect coda.
It’s perhaps a good measure of an album that it can pull in and seduce a listener for whom the music falls somewhat outside their normal listening genre, and by that standard Select Captain has definitely triumphed here, and impressively so. World saved.
