I was coming off a Jawbreaker high when I first heard Captain Asshole at The Fest 18. I liked what I heard, but I also didn’t know if it was because of the music or simply the time and place.
Fast forward through a couple years that most of us want to forget and the band has a new album and I’m giving them a proper listen. Successfully Not Giving Up is their second album overall. The band comes from Munich, Germany and play something I’ve come to think of as “Fest punk.” It’s pop in structure and riddled with gang vocals. It’s community-minded singalong punk, with the gang vocals serving as a metaphor for a “we’re all in this together” general vibe. It’s about struggle, but with a positive resilience, albeit sprinkled with lots of cynicism. Heck, just look at the name of this album to back that up.
Successfully Not Giving Up delivers punchy blasts of that fist in the air style with shades of bands of The Dopamines. “Apocalypse Whenever” is a song that brings the former band to mind, with more blatant cynicism that almost overshadows those euphoric gang vocal moments. “Boy, I’m Homesick” is a whoa-oh crowd pleaser. While the band is from Europe, the lyrics are all in English and accents are minimal given their vocal style. That’s not to say there isn’t a strong cultural stamp. “Post Malort” (they’re good at song titles) is a standout and the album closer. This song features a refrain of “We were drinking Malort in an American parking lot/ I know it should feel wrong/ We were drinking Malort in an American parking lot/ That’s where we belong” that, on every listen, has me picturing that parking lot outside Loosey’s in Gainesville…whether that’s the setting they sing of or not.
If, indeed, Captain Asshole’s mission is to play music to bring us together, they’ve certainly succeeded based on my own associations with time and place, inserting my own experiences alongside their own. Musically it’s a familiar style at this point and they don’t do a lot that separates them from their peers. But they do it very well.
