Searching For The Hows And Whys, the second album from Southend’s Sam Duckworth, aka Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, finds our bohemian teenager growing beyond the lyrical naiveties that riddled his debut to deliver a record of heightened sensitivity and songwriterly nous. From ‘Let The Journey Begin’ onwards, the record is as much a personal odyssey as a political one, a quest, as the title suggests, for answers. Sometimes our hero is wrestling with the world’s injustices, but, just as often, he is moored in the placid waters of self-contemplation, struggling to make sense of himself.
These meditations include ‘Young And Lovestruck’, a song whose melody curls lovely and languorous like campfire smoke, its sense of surety contrasting sharply with the following title-track, where the narrator is baffled by his emotions, the guitar weaving dextrously around the vocal. Elsewhere our caped crusader reverts to the role of musical vigilante, doling out beat-downs to a materialist culture personified by Sex & The City’s Carrie Bradshaw, (‘The Children Are The Consumers Of The Future’), tackling gun crime and fundamentalism (‘I Could Build You A Tower’) and touching on the vacuity of modern and, in particular, celebrity lifestyles on the Kate Nash-adorned ‘Better Things’.
Key Track: ‘I Could Build You A Tower’