At the end of the ’90s, Liverpool indie-poppers the Boo Radleys simply disappeared, followed not long after by their scene-defining label, Creation Records. So Boos songwriter-guitarist Martin Carr assumed the name Brave Captain and headed to Wales—home of his two favorite bands, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and the Super Furry Animals—to record the songs released in the United States as Nothing Lives Long, He Sang, Only the Earth and the Mountains. That mostly overlooked 2001 charmer mingled leftist politics and smidgens of electronica with the sort of gently psychedelic neo-Pet Sounds pop that has flourished west of the border. Much of the new Advertisements for Myself was also recorded in Wales, and the 19-track disc does retain some of its predecessor’s melodic sensibility, most notably in “Betsi’s Beads” and “I Was a Teenage Death Squad,” which suggests a sweeter version of the Auteurs. Yet other parts of the album sound as if they’d been subcontracted to Autechre, Squarepusher, or even former Creation labelmate Primal Scream. Converting to torn-speaker bass and sideways beats at this late date seems almost as perverse as the album’s nearly illegible gray-on-baby-blue credits—or as not including between-albums cult-fave single “Corporation Man.” One of the package’s few readable images shows the Captain brandishing a closed fist, and songs such as “Mobilise” and “Stand Up and Fight” seem designed for some sort of demonstration. But the demo turns out to be mostly stylistic: The former song embalms its rhetoric within a string-swaddled arrangement, and the latter buries a gospel-folkie-rock get-out-the-vote chorus under a truckload of digital grime. There are comely, Nothing Lives Long-style acoustic-guitar tunes beneath about half these tracks—the ones that aren’t synth-beat-scattered asides with titles such as “Kissinger” and “The Blair Bush Project Live @ the Old Skool”—and their appeal sometimes shines through. Still, Advertisements for Myself is a disc that would benefit not from a remix but a demix. —Mark Jenkins