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Album Review
Candymouse
The Light Just Bends
Old Bad Habits Label/Teatime Records
Vinyl/DL/Limited CD-R
Out Now
(5/5)
Candymouse are former members of post C86 bands The Candy Darlings and Mousefolk. Bristol area veterans with a wry self-awareness, they describe their debut as a must-have album for all the Indiepop kids (grown ups or not), and all the pointless Indie bands with out of tune guitars! Self-deprecation and great songs, says Ged Babey, make this is a classic album for the C89 generation.
This years LTW Top 100 Albums of the Year has been notable not only because its full of fantastic stuff – but because of all the ones we somehow omitted because strangely, they didn’t get voted for: – Nadine Shah. Shellac, Girls In Synthesis, the Empty Page. Ist Ist, Berries, Kim Deal, Johny Brown, Primitive Knot….the list goes on and on, and now this one, which was released too late in the year, by Candymouse – any other year they would’ve all been there, but it just proves there is SO MUCH great music around – usually in the ‘underground’ – that we can’t cram it all in.
Anyway, Candymouse are Fab. They are As Cool As…a band of underachiever English white-boy 50-Somethings can be (see photo. Yeah, a bit Dull Mans Club or MasterShed-Builder contestants)- but they are in their musical and artistic prime.
A late-blooming, niche-audience-pleasing prime maybe, but this is a surprisingly great album. It’s for people who gigged and partied and were the post-C86 generation. (I was slightly older but loved the local gigs and remember Mousefolk being a lot of fun at Southamptons Labour Club… despite the fact I identified as a Goth at the time).
The Light Bends is somehow a retrospective encapsulation of the times when ‘Indie’ really was Independent and not a career-option, just something you did for-love, for laughs and for kicks. The post-C86 bands were the next generation of “punks-with-library-cards” who liked some 60’s music as well as the Buzzcocks-and-Velvets-and TVP’s but never really planned ahead of the next release or gig. Somehow decades have elapsed and they are back: older, wiser but cynical and wry… yet they ‘rock’ harder than ever. And have fabulous songs.
Like King of The Pricks – which I wrote about back in 2022 . Another track appeared on a Raving Pop Blast compilation and had the fabulous opening line: ‘I stand here naked before you’ quickly adding in typical uptight English Indie-pop fashion, ‘figuratively, obviously…’.
The album starts with a Pink Flag style 45 second gem. Are You Our Missing Idiot? is a riddle of a song which seems to be about the tabloids, the lottery and bigots. I think.
I Am Not Here quickly follows with some sharp slices of guitar action. More existential post-punk than the jangle-shamble you might expect. Kinda weird too to hear Type 2 diabetes mentioned in a pop song.
Are We Dancing? and Boxed Up weirdly both have guitar parts which seem to somehow be variations on the the Cults She Sells Sanctuary riff with drumming in the style of Vince Ely from Psychedelic Furs. Great lyrics too.
I can see in both directions / But I get lost in self-reflection / Sat inside these 4 walls dreaming / I need something to believe in
Boxed Up is a course a cover of a song by the legend that is The Rev Jonny Kinkaid.
Curious Love has some nice Stones style slide guitar and a Richard Hawley twang and all the ingredients and romance of a proper radio hit for middle-aged lovers.
It’s a curious love until we know just what it means
We use ordinary words to say extraordinary things
Time sets sail, while we’re talking it through
And the light just bends in it’s orbit of you
Not even halfway through the album and it dawns on you that Candymouse are far from being the “pointless indie band” they characterize themselves as being in a later song.
I Can’t Sing has a Primal Scream via the Stones Start Me Up strut but a lyric about self-doubt and middle-aged vulnerability.
I Don’t Understand This Music – Hooky bass and vintage keyboards and a vocal that sounds oddly like Dave Gahan and a great couplet that goes: The heritage tour, now where do I sign up / for the comforting sight of the classic line-up
South of the River is an affectionate tourist guide around Bristol, going from Broadmead to the Watershed bar, Brandon Hill to Stokes Croft, ending up at the Tropic Club.
.
King of the Pricks still sounds regal and Leccy Car is the only throwaway song on the album. The Great Shrugging Void of Your Indifference is as magnificent a title as it is a song and reminds me of Inspiral Carpets / Stone Roses.
Operation Oxbow reminds me of the twang-noir of The Flaming Stars.
Last of the True Believers is THE defining song on the album and Candymouses 24 carat masterpiece. It’s the archetype ‘Indie Loser’ anthem, both knowing-cliché and utterly for-real at-the-same-time.
All of our songs just carry the truth
It’s all we’ve got within us
And all these years just thrashing away
We’re still absolute beginners
As their press release says this is an album about…
Love, life, death, fraternity, liberty; an expression of what that means to a band long enough in the tooth to know how to say it, but with the energy to scream it instead. You won’t hear this on the radio. It’s not that kind of record and wouldn’t sit quietly in a music industry box. The last of the true believers?
Candymouse are, to my mind, one of the last, great, true Indie bands – in that old-fashioned tradition of not giving a flying fig about trends, careerism and the Biz.
Old Bad Habits are the wonderful Greek record label who specialize in releasing precious music by bands like this. There are a lot of people scattered around the globe who appreciate artists free from commercial pressure, record company expectations and marketing strategies, who still make music that fizzes with energy, great tunes and has a knowing wit and honesty in its lyrical content. I hope that audience find the label and this band.
Candymouse don’t even fit the jangly C86 / Sarah Records stereotype: – look at my comparisons: The Cult. Psychedelic Furs, Inspiral Carpets. the Stones, Wire… strange as it may seem for a band with the most-twee of names, Candymouse do rock. And Rule, OK.
The Light Just Bends is probably the 110th best album of the year. But getcha self a copy anyway.
Buy The Light Just Bends from
Old Bad Habits Label (Europe)
or Teatime Records (UK)
All words Ged Babey, with quotes and press release content in italics
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