CURTIS HARDING – DEPARTURES & ARRIVALS: ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN CURT: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
CURTIS HARDING
Departures & Arrivals: Adventures Of Captain Curt (Anti)
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A SPACE OPERA, an 11-song suite that is one long call from the occupant of an interplanetary (yes, Karen, most extraordinary) craft, was not on my bingo card for Curtis Harding’s new album.
Sure, there are no lasers battles or walking on the moon – though some MJ-inspired moonwalking while you listen would work – but the modern soul man positions the eponymous Captain Curt in an old-fashioned lost in space drama. He is lost, alone, maybe even abandoned, rootless, not just physically but emotionally, looking for some explanation that might prove a solace even if escape/rescue may be out of the question.
And that last point matters, because Departures & Arrivals is a concept album and an extended metaphor for Harding’s state of mind, reflecting a long period for him of disorienting disconnection from the world around him. Planet earth may well be blue but not as blue as he is, and there’s nothing he can do. Well, there is something: look inside.
That said, you don’t need to be switched on to science fiction tropes musical, literary or filmic to follow this story –funnily enough, isolation and dislocation are universal; self-reflection and correction easily understood – it matters more that you can find interest in Harding’s always elegant, often mid-tempo soul, and the way he subtly varies the elements within.
The light falsetto he drops in I’m With You before a funky shuffle takes us home is a refreshment, the slow glide of Banh Me with its glistening keyboards that eventually become a space synth solo, cruises rather than takes off, the slightly off-the-beat rhythm of Hard As Stone touches skin when the strings arrive, and the interplay of quite different guitars in The Winter Soldier is a multipoint conversation.
The colours seem at first to be relatively muted, but Harding moves the light at different angles to highlight moments such as the inner-city urgency that rises up to a squelchy synthesiser and falls back to strings in There She Goes, or the piano that sets the direction for True Love Can’t Be Blind’s hi-hat briskness. And there are seemingly endless possibilities in minimal elements within songs, whether it is Out In The Black, a song that confidently balances between sensual and resignation, or I’m With You, where escalation still feels like a question rather than the declaration
Helping this is the fact that Steve Hackman’s string arrangements feel grounded in the past, conscious of it enough to keep a wary eye on excess, but not afraid to just let things go where they must. Which is, to be fair, a characteristic of Harding’s three previous (and ultimately better) albums, and seen to great effect in the most dance-conscious track here, The Power, where flute, strings, lithe guitar and his voice interact but don’t look to dominate. Now that’s how you inhabit space.
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