Cap'n Jazz

Cap'n Jazz sounded like friends discovering the limits of a room in real time. The guitars tangled, the drums rushed forward, and the vocals often arrived as a yelp or a pileup. The looseness was not an absence of feeling. It was the form feeling took.

The band's afterlife is unusually large. Its members carried ideas into American Football, The Promise Ring, Joan of Arc, and other projects, making Cap'n Jazz less a closed chapter than a point of departure.

Start here when the neat version of the genre feels too tidy. This is the sound of the family tree before anyone thought to draw the lines.