Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

The Capstan Shafts were a mystery. No one knew who they were. In the past three years they had released eight albums and a dozen EPs—a quick Google search turns up over 14,000 hits and Pitchfork recently reviewed their last three albums all at once, scoring those 8.2, 7.2, and 7.8 respectively. But until earlier this month, no one even knew what the band looked like. There were no pictures, no press kits, and there were no live performances. Turns out there’s only a sole member, Dean Wells, who slowly and quietly built a small, rabid following by self-distributing his homemade, bedroom-recorded albums while earning a living as a furniture maker in the small town of Lyndonville, Vermont.

Now, Wells is leaving the bedroom. This year his album Environ Maiden was picked up for wide distribution by the Rainbow Quartz label. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to play the CMJ festival in New York City. It was the second time he’d ever played live. “It was intimidating,” says Wells. “I’d never been to New York before. It was so surreal. It was just this weekend so it will probably take me a few days to even realize what happened.”

The Capstan Shafts music is startlingly catchy, lo-fi, melancholic pop rock that sounds like the Smiths if they covered Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The lyrics convey sweeping romanticism, but the music is rooted in the rustling imperfection of everyday. He writes and records alone at home on a four-track, and the recordings have a warm layer of tape hiss as a result. “To be honest, I just love that sound and I always have. Even bad copies of real albums sound good to me that way. I think that goes back to me as a kid. I had a record player that played too fast with crappy speakers and that was the vocabulary of music to me—crappy sounding things—walkmans that didn’t quite work and record players that played wrong.”

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