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CMU Approved
Approved: Marcus Whale
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 29 March 2016
The first single from his debut album ‘Inland Sea’, ‘My Captain’ stands as a bold entrance for Marcus Whale.
Co-produced by HTRK’s Nigel Lee-Yang, the track opens with a frantic, insistent cymbal beat at odds with the glacial bass and vocals which then lay across it. This juxtaposition is built upon until the tension in the track is almost too much to bear, at which point it bursts into a heavy breakbeat that twitches and rolls as Whale’s voice soars above it.
“‘My Captain’, which draws from the queer origin story of nineteenth century figures Captain Moonlite and James Nesbitt, expresses ideas of rebirth through the body of another, and the utopian desire to be liberated through queerness from the oppression of the state”, says Whale, also a member of electronic duo Collarbones.
“Its video, directed sensually and with choreographic precision by Justin McLean, contrastingly focuses in on the drowning and mourning of a beloved” he goes on, “playing out James Nesbitt’s death through a kind of baptismal metaphor, who was shot in a gunfight with police, dying in the arms of his (purported) lover Captain Moonlite”.
Watch that very video here:
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