Best band at SXSW 2010: The Capstan Shafts.

Dean Wells' excellent vocals... what I'd imagine it would sound like if Morrissey's and Jeff Mangum's voices had a baby and raised it together.

Dean Wells, the reclusive songwriter known as the Capstan Shafts, spends his days in northern Vermont, 4-track running, headphones on, laying down sweet shards of fuzzy melody and abruptly revelatory turns of imagery. From this Northeast Kingdom stronghold, he has been sending out homemade cassettes and CD-Rs since 1999. By one count, his discography now extends to 10 EPs and seven full-lengths, each packed to the gills with one and two minute songs, the music on all of them lo-fi to the point of primitivism, the parts overdubbed in a cacophonous parfait, as Wells plays guitar, drums, bass and keyboards. Up to this year, he had never played live and never assembled a band. (He finally performed at CMJ.) The whole shebang would be sort of a freak show... except that the music is so good. Environ Maiden, which collects songs from three self-released EPs from 2007 alone, is the aughties answer to Bee Thousand. It's a pure blast of eccentric creativity and discontinuous inspiration, a rocket launch of songwriting ideas that trails clouds of distortion in its wake.

The disc contains a daunting 29 tracks, yet it runs like a roller coaster, over before you've had time to object to the dips and curves. These cuts bear cracked and whimsical titles like "Right on the Malthus" and "Drop Dead Innocuous." The shortest, "The Origin of Rain" jangles and slashes through a mere 35 seconds, yet seems, in its way, to be a fully-formed and wistfully evocative song. The epic "My Family Is Welsh, I'm Just Tired" is the only cut on the disc to crack the two-minute barrier. It rides a ragged Neil Young-ish guitar line through its crooked, self-lacerating lyrics and cymbal pounding rhythm. Whatever their length, however, the songs have a tossed-off quality, as if the phrases and melodies had just occurred to Wells, and he was only jotting them down before he forgot. And, yet, there are clever verbal turns and indelible hooks embedded, things that might require a great deal of thought to nail down, and are only made to look easy.

Consider, for instance, the 49-second "Hip to the Sweet Blue World," a pure jolt of musical joy and melodic fancy. Garage-rocker guitar licks roughen the edges. Wells' sandpapery tenor scrapes out the melody. There's a hum and hiss of distortion wrapped around the whole enterprise. And yet, when Wells gives his guitar a Townshend ba-da-dum, and the chorus kicks in, there's a never-wrapped-in-plastic freshness to the song, a sweetness filtered by experience, a buoyancy against all odds. "Hip to the sweet blue world" is all Wells says, but it's life and joy and struggle encased in lo-fi optimism.

Environ Maiden includes some verbal cleverness, as when "Right on the Malthus" slips an elliptical reference to the philosopher into its tale of missed romantic connection. Still, this is the kind of album whose strength are almost impossible to describe in prose. The more you think about it, the more you start to see the flaws, the stone age production quality, the ideas that are hardly explored before being tossed aside, the jumps from one song to anotherÉ but look away for a minute, and the melodies drift up out of clouds of static, phrases stick in your head, and songs take shape out of what seemed at first only sketches. It's the kind of record you almost shouldn't look at too directly. Glance accordingly, though, and it glints at you like a gemstone in a gravel pile.

I don't brag about much, but I was the first journalist to interview Guided By Voices, after they'd spent decades in the wilderness. Vampires On Titus was the album that did it for me: brutally short and poignant pop songs, jagged, unfiltered fuzzy, laden with homemade charm and intimate riffs. I still love Vampires enough to recognize its twin 14 years later, from a similarly prolific one-man band from Vermont, Dean Wells. The comparison isn't meant to be derogatory: Environ Maiden is brilliant – and deserves to start its very own cult.

As long as there are "cool-hunters" seeking ever more obscure heroes, there will always be indie singer-songwriters putting out lo-fi home recordings and distributing them, first to friends and then to 'Pitchfork'-reading pop fans. Step forward Dean Wells, aka The Capstan Shafts, whose bedroom recordings make up this debut release proper. Comprising 29 songs, all under two minutes, this is raw roots pop that will appeal to anyone who enjoys the straighter side of Daniel Johnston. Fragments they may be, but there is enough here to put an end to Wells's claim that he has never performed in front of anyone.

Though they flit across the screen like butterflies, each song makes an impression thanks to Wells' knack for intriguing lyrics and his sharp melodic gift.

This Vermont lo-fi one-man-band has put out so much music in the last year or so, and it just keeps getting better.

Mmmmm. Delicious... This is perfect for your musically ADD friend, or anyone who appreciates the early Elephant 6 sound mixed with general, low-fi goodness.

So we have this fella, Dean Wells – known here as the capstan shafts, who seems to be the kind of guy who can pencil down / record / home-master an album all while his Vermont morning cup o' coffee perks through the filter. Likely the rare kind of guy who can make a small masterpiece quicker than his computer's burner can make a duplicate. Yeah, what will likely come to mind is obviously Robert Pollard [hear: "Can't Climb A Tree (Without Breaking A Few Branches)"] or (less-obviously) Lou Barlow – as you really wouldn't be too far off... there is opinionated genius lurking in these 20 tracks. Bee Thousand actually lives damn close to a fantastic track like "Grindcore Tribals" (or "Hominid Stickler") – and every acre of this sacred lot is about called for.

Though a tangle of contradictions – absurdly prolific writer of blink-and-you-miss-'em songs, dynamic, gifted arranger/melodist recording alone, with no more than a rudimentary bedroom four-track – Vermonter Dean Wells still manages to efficiently distill (à la Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard and Television Personalities' Dan Treacy) the emotional core values of his songs. Dispensing with common pleasantries like tidy intros and outros, and with hardly more than a finely timed guitar chime or deft turn of phrase, Wells' whimsical, heart-on-sleeve pop miniatures – like the breezy "Hip To The Sweet Blue World Again" – pack a wallop. [4 stars]

The Capstan Shafts are the one-man band of Dean Wells, who is probably hovering over his four-track cassette recorder right now, saturating a Maxell 90 with a two-minute major-keyed ditty he wrote in his sleep. If he sleeps, that is. In two years now, he has released 51 songs on his first pair of LPs. If all of this reminds you of the manic antics of one Bob Pollard circa 1993, then you're right on target. Environ Maiden, the Capstan Shafts' sophomore outing of lo-fi pop tunes, is a no-brainer for fans of early Guided by Voices. If you dig the noisy, un-produced confections found on GBV records such as Propeller and Vampire on Titus, then you're already a fan of Capstan Shafts. I'm telling you, you don't even need to listen to the 29 cuts that comprise Environ Maiden. But, knowing you, you won't be able to help yourself. Admit it, just reading song titles like "The Complete History of Greenland" and "She's Kick People" has you salivating already. Did I forget to mention that Wells' undeniable pop melodies are buried beneath a cozy blanket of fuzz and hiss? Or that the longest song on the album runs 2:10? The most significant difference between the Capstans and Guided by Voices is Wells' great fondness for acoustic guitar, which is present on most tracks. Okay, so there's a touch of early Mountain Goats here, too. Maybe some Television Personalities, as well. Wherever good guitar pop has been recorded badly, Wells has gladly gone. If you enjoy rummaging a bit to find melodic diamonds in the rough, then the Capstan Shafts await you. RATING: 7

Interview with Dean Wells by Raf Spielman

The Capstan Shafts is Dean Wells and Dean Wells is the Capstan Shafts, tucked away in musical isolation somewhere in Lyndonville, Vermont. Handy with the rudiments of recording technology and equipped with a rock-band's worth of instruments, Wells seems to have put himself to the task of methodically charting the ins and outs of the verse-chorus-verse pop song. Though the profile is modest, it's hard to believe his mission is anything less than world domination – the Capstan Shafts' prolific output is en par with the likes of Jandek or Robert Pollard. Also like Jandek, Wells seems focused almost exclusively on recording his songs; he appeared "live" only once before his recent spurt of publicity thanks to the excellent Environ Maiden. The performance was on WMBR's excellent radio program Phoning It In, and even then he was broadcasting long distance from Lyndonville.

But completely unlike Jandek, Wells has rooted himself firmly in the pop-rock tradition. Almost without exception, one can expect a Capstan Shafts song to be built around a sturdy vocal melody, a steady beat, a familiar chord progression, and to be finished in a concise two minutes. Also to be expected is a faint streak of melancholy running through the tape-hiss, most satisfyingly when the lyrics otherwise border on the surreal or nonsensical. To my ears, Wells' project bears a striking resemblance to upbeat pop of the Bats, but with a greater willingness to let the songs unhinge a little bit, or let a wild, Guided By Voices guitar-solo slip in there every once a while. Wells' has a knack, too, for the thrown-off couplet that sticks in your head for weeks, which is often the saving grace of his less substantial songs.

Capstan Shafts' albums have been released by Kittridge, Asaurus, Yellow Mica, Slight and Wells' own Christmas The Ladder Monkey, and most recently on Rainbow Quartz. Still, the curious reader might still be wondering how, without appearing live and separated from any larger scene, anyone has ever heard of the Capstan Shafts. Beyond the interest the "group" has drawn by association with labels it's worked with, it seems that any name-recognition the band has achieved has been the result of Wells' CD-R carpet-bombing, directed at college radio stations and small, online music publications. Wells' pace seems unflagging at this point, and I can only imagine that the cult army of Cap Shafts fans will continue to grow.

As a last note, and for those interested in the Capstan Shafts but overwhelmed by the number of releases, my favorite album is the 60s-tinged The Sleeved and Grandaughters of the Blacklist, which came out on Abandoned Love records in 2005, and Euridice Proudhon, on Asaurus, is also very good.

Dusted: When you were on Phoning It In, you mentioned that it was around 1999, 2000 when you first started finishing songs and putting things together, what was your musical activity before then? What was it that motivated you to make that change, and to start sending out CD-Rs and looking for an audience for your music?

Wells: Well, I first got a guitar late '99 and instead of learning to play, I started writing songs.

Dusted: And what led you to start sending out CD-Rs?

Wells: There wasn't enough room for everyone to come here and listen to them.

Dusted: Is there any kind of organization, thematic or musical, that decides what songs go on each album or EP, or are they more documents of what's happened in the duration since the last CD? And when do you decide an album or EP is done?

Wells: There's always some vague concept, some book as it were. One idea makes two if it works and three if it fails. So they generally rush out, but the connections are deliberate and when I have enough on that theme that I can throw away half of them, then I consider the album done. Having said that I realize they are all boy/girl songs even if it's a rant against public financing of elections or eminent domain. I'll be singing it to a neo-abstract-expressionist/constitutional lawyer biker chick with a child she never sees named Contrary or Ruin, she can't remember.

Dusted: So, for example, the album Euridice Proudhon, the two guiding ideas are the stories of Euridice, Orpheus' wife, and Proudhon, the 18th century anarchist; is that right? Are the songs then about the overlap of these two ideas?

Wells: It's much more half-assed than that. Didacticism is fine but it takes time away from... non-didacticism, I guess. Really, I equate politics, world view economic idealism, culture hawks, those youthful art-school type ambitions(loosely speaking), inter/intra-personal relations.... I find if I comment on all of it at once, the individual aspects make more sense to me. The more colors the higher the resolution maybe, and of course there is the whole "dig me wordplay" thing. It's the eternal crush, ultimately, these are all loves songs, too.

Dusted: And are there a lot of, um, biker chicks in Vermont?

Wells: There's a little biker chick in all of us.

Dusted: Do you go back to your songs after you've recorded them? Are there songs that you've written that stick with you, that you maybe still play on the guitar every once in a while or hum to yourself in the supermarket?

Wells: I almost never play them after I record them. I do listen to them, though, and find myself singing them at work, in the running order as they appear on the CDs, usually.

Dusted: Is the order particularly important?

Wells: Yeah, pretentious I know, but I can't help thinking of the albums as song cycles, little movie dreams/novellas. They aren't chronologically set but I can't listen to albums out of sequence nor do I skip chapters in books... some do... and they scare me.

Dusted: No, not pretentious at all. I'm actually surprised how rarely albums are song cycles, in more than a very tenuous sense. Actually, this would be better as a question: Are your favorite albums song cycles?

Wells: I always assume albums are stories until proven otherwise. I always loved classical music (classical loosely, romantic era specifically) and as a kid dug soundtracks in that vein; main title, end title, Wagner and the leitmotif; Mahler with his notes about each minute or two section of his symphonies, building to something that lends power to every element which has far too many metaphorical tangents to be enumerated over a six-pack.

Dusted: Do you have a favorite Capstan Shafts album?

Wells: The next album is always the favorite, all potentiality and vision. But I tend to think of them all as one big piece so....

Dusted: What comes first when you write a song? And when you start recording a song, how much of it is written, or conceived in your head, and how much of it is a result of the process?

Wells: Usually start just dragging phrases or nonsense over chord changes. I have lines jotted down but most of the song is held in my head, maybe 70 percent done when I push "record". Most stuff released likely went writing to mix down in an hour or so.

Dusted: One of the things I like about Capstan Shafts songs are the weird words that come up, "nudebranchs," "semiotics," "the NEA," to name a few from the album I just listened to. Where do these words come from?

Wells: So much of the words are just what feels good to sing, what fits the line but, yeah, you could call me a "reader."

Dusted: Do your friends like your music?

Wells: Some do... it doesn't come up much. Most have a more utilitarian view of music; TV songs, all-girl trailer dance parties – well, she told me they only allow girls.

Dusted: Are there other groups out there that, though you aren't playing shows with them or playing in bands with them, you feel a connection or affinity with? Groups that you hear their music and you think, "Yeah, I'm glad someone out there is making music like that," or, "Yeah, these people are on the same wavelength as me"?

Wells: And I know you don't mean a movement or even a sub-genre, but I don't hear a lot of current bands, though I like reading about them. I'll give that a little more thought. Mostly I put the coffee on and sit by the four track. It all makes sense at the time. It's difficult to explain.

Picked as one of Magnet's "Hidden Treasures of 2007".

Up until very recently, Dean Wells was something of a mystery. Having released six shockingly consistent home-recorded full-lengths as the Capstan Shafts, Wells had yet to play a single live show, release a photograph of himself, or even maintain his own MySpace page. Was he a crazy recluse? Hideously disfigured? Cthulhu? For all the speculation among a small cabal of internet nerds (myself, admittedly, included), it turns out there was never really any mystery at all. Chalk it up to the inherent strangeness of the information age – a musician like Wells only seems enigmatic and suspect at a time when access to an artist's personal information is considered a god-given right, and many bands seem more interested in online self-promotion than writing songs. It's sad that this should mark him as such an anachronism, but Wells is a true pop craftsman, working regularly and diligently on his music and not particularly concerned with the trappings of self-promotion. No wonder his songs are among the best being written today.

While Environ Maiden will likely be Wells' entry into the world of indie rock at large, the album itself reflects no such change. Largely comprised of older tracks (including some from 2006's The Megafauna Undermined), Environ Maiden is firmly in keeping with Wells' tradition of excellent, prolific, and understated indie pop. While not quite as stunning as 2006's Euridice Proudhon or the more recent Her vs. the Sad Cold Eventually, Environ Maiden makes a strong case for the louder and scrappier side of Wells' recorded output.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Environ Maiden and its predecessors is its length; Environ Maiden consists of 29 short, fuzzed-out and hook-filled songs, and is the only Capstan Shafts albums to clock in at over 35 minutes. And while nothing on the album reeks of filler, this quantity of homespun recordings can be daunting. Thankfully, Wells opens Environ Maiden on its most promising and inviting note; opener "Right on the Malthus" is likely the strongest track on the album, and one of Wells' most fully realized songs to date. "Sincere as a Windchime" uncannily recreates the acoustic guitar sound from the Guided by Voices fave "Awful Bliss" to great effect. And the jaunty "The Origin of Rain" touches on a shocking number of hooks in its scant 34 seconds.

Other songs require a bit more effort to parse: "Flip Cup Casualties" initially comes off as flat and half-assed, but reveals a handful of surprisingly catchy moments on repeat listen. There is a much of muchness to Environ Maiden's sound by the time you get 15 or 20 songs in, but the latter part of the record is not without its gems. "The Ballad of Kid Butane", "The Complete History of Greenland", and "Drop Dead Innocuous", which Wells played in sequence at his first ever live show, make for a particularly action-packed three-and-a-half minutes. Album closer "Northern Me!" shows Wells growing substantially as an arranger, and is host to what could be his most expressive vocal performance yet.

Lyrically, Environ Maiden continues to establish Wells as one of indie pop's best writers. Across the board, Wells' lyrics are characteristically clever, self-effacing, morally ambiguous, and slyly suggestive. Opener "Right on the Malthus" describes a patch of sky as viewed over a girl's shoulder: "The natural place for the sky to rest/ Is her left shoulder just above the breast/ And below her earlobe that insists on being chewed/ By someone who never should've got their teeth into you." The line between clever romantic observation and simpering romantic cliché is a fine one, and Wells continues to navigate it masterfully, approaching his subjects with wit and insight but never sabotaging himself with sarcasm or ironic distance.

At first, I was disappointed that Wells wasn't using Environ Maiden and the wider exposure it seems set to give him as a chance to showcase the best songs in his repertoire, as Guided by Voices had done with Propeller. But therein lies one of the greatest differences between Pollard and Wells; whereas Pollard always sported a "fuck-you-I'm-gonna-be-famous" attitude, Wells seems much more interested in the process of recording than in its potential rewards. Indeed, with a solid seven albums under his belt, Wells is forging a stylistic niche that goes far beyond his well-documented GbV fetish. Whether he sticks with the solo 4-track approach or finds a band and a studio, his songs will always sound like Capstan Shafts songs. And, if his output thus far is any indication, they'll always be pretty damned good.

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."

Despite his solo approach to recording, the albums are full of texture and instrumentation. "I'll play the initial track, the rhythm and singing, usually acoustic, and just layer stuff until I'm happy with it. The song's usually pretty rough when I do the initial track. Until I had to learn them to perform them, pretty much, the track you hear on the album, that's the only time the song's been played all the way through."

The name Capstan Shafts is a wry reference to Wells's recording style. "It's part of a tape recorder. I saw it in the manual of a four-track and I saw it highlighted – I guess it jumped out at me. It's the part of a tape recorder that the tape runs around. I was using a beat-up four-track and it just seemed totally appropriate." His eighth album, Environ Maiden, was released on October 16th and is the first to be available in actual brick-and-mortar stores. The title is "kind of a smart-ass joke. It's kind of a play on environmentalism as a theme in the album. A very loose theme."

On October 6th, Wells played his debut show, solo, in a rural 19th century, one-room church in Stannard, Vermont. The venue was close to the middle of nowhere and the performances had to be done by candlelight. "It was a little past nowhere, actually. I had never even been up there. There was a dirt road and it was rainy and the road was washing out. So, even by my standards, it was the middle of nowhere. It was fun. I was very nervous about doing it. But they were a very friendly crowd, nice people. There was no electricity. But it was a good venue. It was very dark. "I had already agreed to do the CMJ thing just because I thought it'd be ridiculous not to and some promoters from Burlington asked me to do that, and I thought it would be good practice in front of people since I had never been in front of people before. It was only like two weeks before so I figured it was a good way" he pauses, "I'm just getting used to it."

For the CMJ show Wells wanted to showcase the sound of the songs as they are on the albums. Since he plays all of the instruments on the record himself, he needed some sonic support. A "friend of a friend" introduced him to the band, Rural Electric. "I think they had a hard time kind of figuring out what I was doing when I was showing them because they're more like, real musicians and, I'm... I'm not really. They had a hard time figuring out what I meant. They did a good job, but it's difficult if you're not used to talking to people about music – it's difficult to translate your ideas to them. And I'd never actually had a conversation about music other than just as a listener, as a fan. I'd never had a conversation about music in terms of chords; this is a diminished C or whatever."

Bootlegs of the CMJ showcase have surfaced online and the full band sounds righteous. When asked about recording with a group in the future, he's enthusiastic. "I would love to. I would love to hear band interpretations. Not necessarily in the studio, but ya know, have a band playing in the basement – I would love to hear that. But I would almost have to record the album all the way through and then re-do it. I don't know that I could write things thinking of other people. I think I'd have to finish it and then re-do it. It's just never been an option. I don't really know any musicians or at least not those interested in the kind of music that I like. And the band I played with at CMJ is like five hours away. They're in Belfast, Maine."

That's the price paid for isolation. Lyndonville is a town with a population of only around 1,200. When asked why he was so reclusive early on, Wells is quick to deny solitude as his goal. "It was the way it worked out. I was just sending things out and no one was paying attention. So there was no grand design, it just pretty much happened that way.

"Before, I was just sending it out. I would just make a hundred copies and just send them out. Every once in a while people would ask me for copies and I'd say I don't have any, I've sent them all out." Despite the prolific output and proficiency for solid-gold, heart-wrenching pop nuggets, Wells hasn't been at it for very long. "I got a guitar in September or October of '99 and I pretty much just started making albums. The first year I made an album a month for a year and then somebody noticed it, and so I stopped doing it for a couple of years and learned how to play. More or less. To the extent that I've learned how to play. I just felt like making records more than learning how to play. It's just fun, basically that's the only reason I'm doing it. I don't really have any grander scheme than that. I just really enjoy the process. It's fun to make little songs and put little titles on them."

It's surprising that he's never had trouble balancing his day job with his prolific musical output. "I pretty much come home and record. That's what I do. Put on the coffee and go into the music room, put my headphones on and then I'm happy." There are 29 tracks on Environ Maiden; all of his albums contain around 20 to 30 songs. With the EPs, the total number of songs he's released in the past three years exceeds 200. But the most impressive thing about his catalog isn't the volume; it's his consistency of excellence. He's like a pop-savant where great tunes spring forth like he can't stop it. He describes his process as organic: "The lyrics are mostly jotted down – they're not done, they're fragments – and I usually just have those pages at my foot and play chords and sing nonsense words and grab from those pages. From start to finish, I spend probably an hour or two [per song]. The only reason I know that is my coffee timer is two-hours and I'll usually finish a song before it goes off."

Environ Maiden is Wells's third album to be released in 2007. He released three in 2006 as well. Given that his latest is the first on a label with distribution, it might make sense to slow down and push each album a little bit more now in terms of promotion, but Wells says he has no intention of slowing down. "This one album was licensed to Rainbow Quartz. I have no idea what the future holds with that. It was more that they were willing to put it out 'as is,' and it seemed like a good idea at the time. As far as future albums, most likely there will be three or four albums at the beginning of the year and there will be like 50 copies each or something. I think in those terms when I'm writing. I don't think about having to wait for things to come out and promoting them. I'd rather think of things individually and just do them and move on."

If you've been keeping up with us here at RetroLowFi, you're no stranger to the music of the Capstan Shafts. However, today marks an important day in Shafts historyÉ the first nationally distributed album under the Shafts moniker hits stores today. That record is Environ Maiden.

I'd been debating how to approach talking about this one. Do I treat it like any other Capstan release, or do I make a big deal out of it? Nay to both, I say. I thought this might be a good time to catch up on the project's saga for any newcomers. Here's a few points to bring you up to speed:

The Capstan Shafts has been the brainchild of a man named Dean Wells from Vermont. Environ Maiden is roughly the 22nd Capstan Shafts release since 2004. Some of those releases are just short EP's, some were on casette, and a few of them only exist at archive.org. All of them are uniformly fantastic. Dean's a pretty mysterious guy. He keeps a low profile, and has only recently started performing live. Said performance marked the first time that anyone in his rabid fanbase had ever even seen what the guy looks like. An average Capstan Shafts song usually doesn't run over a minute and forty-five seconds. Usually they are wildly distorted, lo-fi recordings with the catchiest melodies this side of nursery rhymes. That's all you really oughta know before popping Environ Maiden into your player. And if you're listening to Dean's stuff for the first time with this albumÉ oh boy, do I envy you. See, a few of these tracks date back to other Shafts records – "My Family Was Welsh, I'm Just Tired" originally appeared on last year's The Megafauna Undermined, a few tracks were intended for the aborted Consumption Violets full length, and plenty of tunes popped up on the recent www.archive.org EP's – so it's hard to hear these songs in a new context and really get inside of how this must flow for a first-time listener. What I *can* verify is this: Environ Maiden is a fucking solid pop album. Just a wall-to-wall, non-stop, brilliant thirty-six minutes of lo-fi genius.

At some point during the course of your perusal through this record, you'll probably note a distinct resemblance between Dean's songs and that of the 1992-1995 era of Guided By Voices. Well, no worries there. You certainly aren't alone, as a large part of the current Capstan Shafts fanbase seems to be made up of the diehard Bob Pollard contingent. And since they tend to be such a devout bunch, it's a perfect fit for Mr. Wells, who tends to put out nearly as many releases as Uncle Bob himself does nowadays.

But Environ Maiden itself? Great stuff, man. Mostly major-key pop blasts recorded through a dense wall of fuzz, ranging from the oughta-be-a-classic "The Ballad Of Kid Butane" all the way to stunning minute-long blasts of sunshine pop like "The Flowering Universe Confounds". With nary a misstep along the way, Environ Maiden is pretty much the perfect introduction to one of America's finest songwriters.

If you haven't checked out anything by The Capstan Shafts, this is the perfect time to start, and Environ Maiden is your gateway drug.

Some of the best bedroom pop around... lo-fi nuggets so delicious you fear you'll get an uncurable sugar high just listening to one of his albums.

Day 5 @ Arlene's Grocery (Rainbow Quartz CMJ showcase 2007) live performance review
NYC's slowest cabdriver nearly made me miss this miracle: the first-ever live performance by a 'band' that previously consisted of one tireless home-recorder, Dean Wells, releasing to a prototypical 'small but devoted audience'. For his live debut he had a seasoned band learn his songs and then sang, guitar-less, in front of them. It was a genius move. His trusty 4-track recorder gets the job done, but hearing the songs played without fuzz revealed them to be better than anyone knew. What's greater than finally seeing a band you love play live? Having the music take on a new life before your ears. This invigorating and absolutely revelatory performance confirmed that Wells is one of the great underheard pop-rock songwriters of our time, with smart, funny, moving songs that possess melodies like miracles. I haven't felt so energized by live music in years.