At least theoretically, Adam Pierce's music as Mice Parade gets around. To observe the inclusive aspirations of his rhythmically twisted indie pop, one need not actually listen at all. Rather, simply read the dossier for his decade-plus of output: Two album titles are in Portuguese, while another references the birthplace of Mozart, the Austrian city of Salzburg. He's named pieces for reindeer, linked them to nocturnal Asian dalliances, and borrowed from rudimentary Hebrew. Japanese electronics heavyweight Nobukazu Takemura has remixed his work, as have Norwegian designer Kim Hiorthøy and wunderkind/manchild Jim O'Rourke. For several albums, Mice Parade even employed Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, the pixie-voiced singer of Iceland’s Múm, as a muse; for Mice Parade's most recent two records, Pierce instead chose the diminutive coo of Japanese-American songwriter Caroline Lufkin. Mice Parade, for better and worse, is a sort of living music-as-the-universal-language manifesto.
Mice Parade's latest, Candela, once again surveys world music through a bracing indie pop filter, played by the busy (and occasionally brilliant) drummer and multi-instrumentalist Pierce and a half-dozen guests. It’s named for a flamenco favorite in Madrid where, as Lonely Planet puts it, the city’s “young performers hang out downstairs in an informal bar where spontaneous music often breaks out late in the evening.” Within these 10 tracks, Pierce toys with Afropop and Afrobeat, flamenco guitar and singing, samba and gamelan, Appalachian folk rearrangements and icy European electronic ambience. Perhaps more than ever, though, the constituent pieces of Pierce's polyglot approach show their seams, with the multicultural touchstones often at unflattering odds with Pierce's more assured bedrock. In a desperate effort to prove worldly erudition, Mice Parade has forsaken the overall effect and strength of its songs.
Indeed, the tunes on Candela work best when they limit the number of themes they explore. Candela certainly starts with that understanding: During opener "Listen Hear Glide Dear", Pierce quietly pleads between tremolo guitars that fan over him and distant drums that rupture like distant roman candles. "Currents", the best song on the album, follows with similarly austerity. In typical Mice Parade fashion, the song conjoins several influences, from the music-box keyboard melody that introduces Lufkin and her gorgeously controlled voice to the rhythm section's aggressive African sizzle and the neon guitar solo that monopolizes the middle. But all of these elements conspire wonderfully for four minutes, registering an urgent and complex pop tune. These songs aren't short on ideas or influences; they simply funnel every piece toward one aim, strengthening the experience rather than distracting from it.
More often than not, however, Mice Parade pushes these songs down paths that don't fit. For instance, "Contessa" moves with the basic rhythm and melancholy of an antediluvian folk number such as "The House Carpenter". Its simplicity is its charm. But it ends with an organ jazz vamp, unnecessarily complicating a tune that can't support such accessories. "This River Has a Tide" opens and ends with Pierce moaning woozily over a grinding electric guitar, but the band swivels into a somber acoustic midsection, with Lufkin cooing through a bridge that the song never needed to cross. And "Pretending" hangs on one of the best hooks Pierce has ever written. Big drums radiate behind bigger guitars, tucked behind bold harmonies. But during the verses of the loquacious duet, his drums can't sit still, shifting the beats like he's scared of settling into the meter. Those disparate parts beset one another, resulting in an almost-great song that's nearly unlistenable.
Candela stumbles the most when it serves as an uncertain tour guide. The otherwise meek break-up tune "Las Gentes Interesantes" skips into an unexpected samba groove twice, adding stylistically accurate but entirely awkward trumpet, piano, and percussion during the second pass. Above nylon-stringed guitar, title track "Candela" relays Pierce's romantic travelogue through Spain, where a lover leaves Madrid to meet him in Barcelona after a navigational hiccup. It's a sweet tale and, especially for Pierce, poignantly written. But after four short verses, New York flamenco singer Gisele Saad Assi cuts in, airing her grievances as the beat doubles down for no reason other than to stretch the song toward a slow fadeout. Both tracks feel like unfortunate tourism, where an exotica fascination overpowers allegiance to the tune. "Candela" could have lasted 90 seconds, for instance, and been a simple, bittersweet love story. As is, it's nearly reason enough to give up on the album that takes its name.
