Candy: A Pull To Heal | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- There’s a prize place on the mantle of Australian bedroom-pop for the jubilant, does-it-really-matter-we’re-all-going-to-die-anyway work of Calum Newton. A year and a half after the release of his DIY project Candy’s second LP, Everything in Motion, the OG sad boy-songwriter returns with A Pull To Heal. True to form, the record is produced and mastered by Newton, with the notable contribution of slick LA-based producer Matthew Neighbour on mixing duties. And an upgrade from drum machines and jangly guitars to a fuller rock sound further proves Callum’s commitment to incrementally refining the Candy sound, chiselling away at its edges until it reveals the Mount Rushmore of anxious indie-guitar music.

Since we last heard from Candy, Australians have hardly been short of stimulus to boost our collective stress about the state of the world we inhabit. Black Summer bled into the pandemic, bringing the phrases ‘climate anxiety’ and ‘mass trauma’ into common usage. While Callum says these songs have been in the works for a long time, there’s something prescient about his uneasiness on dystopian single Clean or the Ocean Party-esque Buried in the Ground. Over a bendy guitar melody, there’s a crack in his bright delivery. “I think I’m losing it/I’m splitting at the seams,” he sings. “What will become of me when these oceans flood Circular Quay?” Two-thirds of the way through the track, House Deposit’s Sam Lyon lends an elegiac saxophone solo that echoes the bluesy, wailing guitar in Courtney Barnett’s Depreston - a vocalisation of absence.

Newton continues to be fascinated with narratives of legacy - what’s left behind and what’s lost, either in his own life and relationships, or in the stories of others. One of the strongest tracks on Everything in Motion was Familiar, from the perspective of someone living with dementia. On A Pull to Heal, he gives us the punchy, crashing Avalanche of Pain, set around the events of the 1997 Thredbo landslide. Newton’s voice rings out: “When it’s done, when it’s over/ Will you remember my name?”

Ironically, the act of freezing these thoughts, observations and worries in his music might be what preserves their legacy. On the one hand, Callum wears his nihilism on his sleeve - in the lyrics of Reaper, he’s apparently so unfazed by the imminence of death that he rhymes ‘grim reaper’ with ‘street sweeper’. But on the other, you get a sense that his compulsion to document the pointlessness comes from an attachment to what will be lost, and a hope that somebody is listening when he yells into the void. You can hear it on the crunchy, driving album closer Silent Spring, with his snarling declaration of “our destruction dealt from our hands”. And it’s on Affirmation Fixation: the single he penned, shaken and panicky after an episode of derealisation last year. “Everything has to pass, everything will not last/Wishful thinking, you’re not sinking, affirmation fixation.” Like so much of his songwriting, the mantra he repeats in the choruses acts as an antidote to the aloneness he’s certain of.

As Candy invites more collaborators into the bedroom with him, his voice remains steady at the heart of his work. Three releases in, the sugar rush is present as ever, and any dentists who are worried about that should know that dental health hardly matters when the climate crisis is probably going to wipe us out anyway!

- Aleisha McLaren.
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