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Heavy Capt.

 Cover Places, Strange & Wrong

 Release Date: April 25th, 2025

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Places, Strange & Wrong



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Bio/Album Info


Genre: sinuous, guitar-centered bedroom pop

Places, Strange & Wrong is the new full-length, sparklingly genre-absorbent album from Heavy Captain, the lyrical project of composer and multi-instrumentalist, Dylan Deimler (pronounced dime-lure) (he/him). Currently based in Lancaster, PA after a decade in Philadelphia, Deimler was previously part of the freak-folk duo, Orca Orchestra, and wrote and performed as country-tinged alt-ego Milton Haysbury, with both projects touring the US. In 2022, he eponymously released two instrumental works: Atmospheric Garland, a spacey mix of guitars and synths and an EP grounded in the fictional filmic American West, OK Corral. He is cofounder of the Philly-based LP/cassette label, Magic Death Sounds (Banned Books, Jamaican Queens).

Joined by Nashville percussionist Dominic Billett (Echolalia) and vocalists Megan Gouda (Bodyguard) and Devon Deimler on select tracks, Places, Strange & Wrong is otherwise entirely produced and performed by Deimler, utilizing the same Korg Workstation with which he recorded 2006 Baltimore breakout albums by Ecstatic Sunshine(Freckle Wars) and Ponytail (Kamehameha).

This release follows Ride the ____ , a collection of home recordings made while undergoing chemotherapy. Injections of the heavy metal platinum and the sense of captaining a body that had become a sinking ship—along with cryptic graffiti on his father’s old copy of Highway 61—birthed the name Heavy Capt. With Places, Strange & Wrong, Deimler’s resilient spirit combines with supernatural talent to produce a 9-track voyage through layered worlds and returns to life. It’s an album about shifts of being: loss and acceptance, anger and longing, fate and hope, and the translucent fantasies of inner and other worlds—through which we endure or escape hard realities. Imagistically, the album is populated by “kingfisher-calm” nature metaphors and a great surround of anthropomorphic figures, which also animate the album’s cover art: a freaker’s ball of doodles by Deimler’s father (who contributed his own coming-of-age poetry for adaptation on two tracks).

The parallel worlds that Places, Strange & Wrong glides through exist under a kaleidoscopic dome of stylistic influence. Early Bowie glam and Taking Tiger Mountain Eno meet cosmic country, by way of Bakersfield and Laurel Canyon. Procol Harum’s mournful cadence and piano-organ instrumentation grafts with syncopated beats and blue notes. Mellotron 60s Baroque pop (Satanic Majesties-era Rolling Stones and Odessey and Oracle Zombies) slips into bossa nova easy-does-it and millennial Moon and Antarctica atmospheres, or marches it out with Neil Diamond 3-chord songcraft. Lou Reed’s white light is a spiritual influence, as is the photography of Diane Arbus. Lyrically, Heavy Capt. approaches the runaway symbology of Marc Bolan while easing into Dylan-esque poetic turns and storytelling.

Vocally, in various crests, we hear Bolan and Dylan, too, with twinges of Joe Strummer, Ray Davies, Richard O’Brien, or the soulful tenor of Jerry Garcia. Guest vocalists lend dreamy harmonies reminiscent of Emmylou Harris and Graham Parsons, or of Mama Cass and Michelle Phillips crooning in from some faraway beach.

Places, Strange & Wrong is contemplative but upbeat, urgent but unhurried, a transcendent coming-of-age album made at 37 years old that is in effect a walled garden — it’s multi-specied flora forming one tangled network of roots.

Dylan Deimler


Additional Resources


Album Credits (including pronunciation/pronouns), Full Lyric Sheet, FCC Compliancy Info, & Link to Radio Edits. click here

Streaming Links: Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube/Deezer/Pandora/Tidal/Amazon/Bandcamp