Tugboat Captain and the earnest, tightly wound embrace of "Like Caroline"

 

"up by the reservoir / there was a burning car / and people behind the bar were rushed right off their feet / down at the cemetery / where you read me poetry / I said it's cliché but hey / at least it's not Morrissey..." 

The jangly embraced blend of folk, baroque pop, jangle pop (filtered through 70's garden rock filters) of "Like Caroline" by London based Tugboat Captain makes you want to take a road trip to that coastal place you like up north where the air smells, well, like air. The festive flute-esque flute, synth, or Mellotron sounds feels sort of Van Morrison (circa 70's) and Alexander Sokolow’s vocals feel cool and comforting. Like a lot of Tugboat Captain songs, "Like Caroline" feels like having drinks with friends that you dearly love but don't see enough at the local bar or eatery. 

I dig the sound here a lot. The synergy, the pushed urgency is edgy, the musicality top notch but this meeting between friends ends sort of awkwardly. The outro a fun jammy instrumental fades out when I expected more and then the song to resume (sad). Besides that everything is perfectly fine here. 

Of the song Tugboat Captain shares:

[Tugboat Captain’s third single of 2023, Like Caroline, is a love letter to leafy, suburban South-East London. Littered with allusions to gentrification, Catholicism and all the internal conflict contained therein, the song drifts across singer Alexander Sokolow’s personal pocket of suburbia. Like much of the new material from Tugboat Captain, musically, the track blends modern and retro tones, with warm mellotron flutes and jangling guitars rubbing up against day-glo synth solos. It also maintains the gently psychy energies of their new material alongside a slightly humbler, more intimate vibe. As ever Tugboat Captain maintain total DIY independence, producing, engineering and mixing the song themselves with accompanying artwork by bassist Josh Cobb.] 

-Robb Donker Curtius

THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM 

https://www.facebook.com/TheTugboatCaptain/

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3gBLnOLSOAV0tXQa6ZGGKb

https://tugboatcaptain.bandcamp.com/

https://www.instagram.com/tugboat_captain/


Born in 2017 as the solo project of London based multi-instrumentalist Alexander Sokolow, Tugboat Captain have morphed over three albums and a handful of EP's into an ambitious baroque-pop four piece. Growing from 2017's moody lo-fi debut 'The Tugboat Captain' through jangly, folk-inflected sophomore record 'Everybody Seem's To Think That I'm A Raincloud', into the murky waters of a 2020 lockdown the band released their debut studio album, 'Rut'. On Rut the band emerged from the sonic limitations of homespun bedroom-pop accompanied by a ramshackle orchestra of friends with a grand, symphonic pop record which lost none of the intimacy of the previous work that garnered significant critical acclaim across the UK DIY community.

Tugboat Captain, "Like Caroline", folk indie, indie rock, 70's garden rock tones, dreamy, storytellers, dream pop, London, baroque pop, jangly pop,