Martin Carr

When the Boo Radleys disbanded in 1998, Martin Carr launched a solo path as Brave Captain and issued a consistent run of albums, EPs, and singles through the early 2000s. Those wide-ranging, electronically inclined tracks departed sharply from the group’s guitar-driven shoegaze approach and marked the first sustained instance of Carr handling lead vocals himself. After Distractions appeared in 2006, he retired the Brave Captain alias and credited 2009’s Ye Gods (And Little Fishes) to his own name. By then the range of styles had coalesced into a hybrid drawing on folk, baroque pop, country, dub, and echoes of the Boo Radleys’ power-pop energy. Apart from one 2012 single, he stayed largely out of view until September 2014, when German imprint Tapete issued his next full-length effort, The Breaks. Following a period of songwriting that left him feeling stalled, Carr was deeply shaken by David Bowie’s death. He scrapped the material at hand and instead committed to an album that would express his authentic artistic identity. Working alone in his Cardiff home studio, he frequently captured songs in the moment of composition and altered his method by sampling sounds for playback via keyboard. After six months he again set the pieces aside, yet a subsequent single tracked with producer Greg Haver and mixer Clint Murphy (“Gold Lift”) prompted him to bring the same pair in to complete the record. The resulting, introspective New Shapes of Life—largely free of guitars—came out on Tapete in late 2017.