Captain Jacobs - Good Luck... You Need it!

Captain Jacobs Good Luck... You Need it! cover
Captain Jacobs
Good Luck... You Need it!
Revalve Records
2013
4
Captain Jacobs is a hard rock act from Italy that describes their music as ideal for “any fan of Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Whitesnake”. I, on the other hand, don’t see much resemblance. Personally, I could go so far as to describe them as a kinda OK band to start off before discovering the previously mentioned bands. That’s because if you’ve listened to Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Whitesnake, Captain Jacobs have nothing to offer you. If somebody would collect the most indifferent tracks from all those bands and put all those songs in one album, it would sound pretty much like “Good Luck... You Need it!”. In other words, it’s not bad, but it’s definitely poor.
 
One thing that I can definitely say about “Good Luck... You Need it!”; it’s very obvious that it’s the band’s first attempt. The album is filled with boring cliché vocals, over-played guitar riffs, and unimaginative musical compositions. It’s almost enough just to look at the names of their songs to know how immature and uninspired the whole record is. I mean, “Child of the Night”, “Born Wild” and, my personal favorite, “We Drink Beer”. Lyrically and musically, this album brought to mind the kind of stuff me and my friends used to write during our high school band days. Unoriginal and with nothing to offer to the music world.
 
To be fair, the guitar player does show traces of potential during some of the solos (like in “Fantasy Girl” for example). Maybe Captain Jacobs’s biggest drawback is the singer. His voice, for starters, is nothing to write home about, his generic singing style is somewhat outdated and finally his, Serbian sounding accent is just atrocious.
 
Furthermore, I personally found the various sound effects that are scattered around the album to be redundant and, quite frankly, a bit off-putting. I didn’t really think much of the wind, thunder and helicopter sounds in “Rain” (the intro to the record). And, how seriously can you take a band that injects the sounds of someone cracking open a beer can, sipping (in the loudest way possible) and then exhaling with pleasure, in the middle of a song called “We Drink Beer”?
 
So, if Captain Jacobs do decide to release a second album (I really wouldn’t mind if they never do), I would have to wish them… “Good Luck... You Need it!”...