- After a warm reception at Bigsound this year, it appears people have finally developed a taste for Candy. His bittersweet brand of ‘80’s guitar licks and lilting synths has, for years, been a surprisingly well kept secret. Calumn Newton has, up till now, used his side-project as more of an outlet for his private heartaches than a shot at nu-romantic stardom.
His other, much more brash and bratty garage-surf-pop-whatever band Lunactics On Pogosticks gobbled up most of the spotlight, leaving him to express his quieter, more adult emotions in relative private. The Lunatics haven’t updated their Facebook since mid-2017, so I don’t know what’s going on there exactly, but it’s nice to see that Candy’s taking the opportunity to give his new record a bit more publicity than usual.
Oh, by the way, if, like me, you’ve been a Candy-fan for a while, you may well raise an eyebrow when he calls Under The Weather his debut album. I guess that makes Candy’s slew of other, mournful pop long-players, what, mixtapes? Extremely overstuffed EPs? I don’t want to sound bitter or anything but is he denying we have a past together? That would be oddly apropos for an artist who trucks relationship angst in bulk, but, no, I’ve been waiting for years for the rest of the world to wake up to Candy and I’ll take a new record along with whatever white lies he wants to tell about it.
As long as we acknowledge that they even exist, how does Under The Weather compare to Candy’s previous records? There’s a lot that’s the same and even if this weren't a re-launch of sorts, I reckon that'd be completely fine. The mixture of late-’80’s guitar-pop, new-wave and the occasional bite of post-punk is a constant. So too is the mopy emotion: a flood of discontent that spills forth from opening single, Validation or as Candy puts it: “I need, I need validation” repeated until you burst into whiny tears. It’s not as relentlessly needy as The Smiths, but it comes close. It’s kind of difficult to believe how long Calumn has been this upset, but he’s so good at sugar-coating the angsty pills, that I just keep popping them.
It’s not all the same, though. Under The Weather is a significantly louder and more forceful record than any other Candy has put out. It’s both produced louder and played louder. The whispery quality of something like 2016’s Waiting For U is missing. This has pluses and minuses: none of this sounds like The Chills any more -it just isn’t that subtle- but it does have the striking rock tunefulness of early REM. I wonder if this is all because some of the Lunatics’ sound has found its way in here? Every time I listen to the record that feels more likely to me.
Under The Weather is also more stylistically unified. Previously Candy embraced a freedom to experiment that produced surprisingly diverse records; that’s one of the key elements that has always kept me coming back. As the studio compression gets dialled up, conversely, some of that adventurousness has been packed away, like Calumn knows too well from his other band to try and bring that stuff to a bigger audience.
Calumn Newton is a really impressive musician with ever so much more depth than you’d initially expect. Speaking of which, it feels like he’s in flux right now and I’m not quite sure I can fathom where that will lead. Candy’s new record leaves me feeling bittersweet, which is exactly how all his records have made me feel. It’s just that it’s in a slightly different way now.
- Chris Cobcroft.