"It's not Chinese braille," Quinn Walker pleads around the midpoint of promising Brooklyn chamber-poppers Suckers' sophomore set, Candy Salad. That little curio, oddly enough, might just be the clearest statement Candy Salad makes amidst its 45 twisting, turning minutes. While puzzling it out, I kept coming back to this line, an indication that, hey, maybe this stuff isn't the hardest to grok. At their best, Suckers' songs-- rousing post-Arcade Fire uplifters, vitamin E-soaked sunbeamers, and the occasional yearning ballad-- match ornate instrumental flourishes to rousing, roundabout melodies. But Suckers are tinkerers at heart, and with producer Matt Boynton behind the boards this time out, no sound on Candy Salad's left untweaked, untreated, or untroubled. It's a real surplus of sound, but sometimes the songs themselves feel a little lost amidst the shuffle.
More than likely, Candy Salad's surface pleasures wil be enough to draw you in: the wriggly guitar fissures that open "Charmaine", the underwater gurgle that multi-instrumentalist Pan applies to much of his low-end bass work, the snatches of Tropicália that surround the glinting "Turn on the Sunshine". 2010's Wild Smile didn't shy away from this slip-sliding instrumentation, but 10 seconds into opener "Going Nowhere" and it's clear Suckers and Boynton spent much of their time in the studio settling on pedal settings and the like. When Suckers' early buzz was peaking around the time of their stellar single "It Gets Your Body Movin'", much was made of their connections with legit weirdos Yeasayer, MGMT, and others. But, a couple of lines about "bodies in the basement" and serving as somebody's concubine aside, Suckers mostly relegate any oddness to these perpetually unfurling production flourishes.
The songs underneath, then, are left to provide the sturdy canvas upon which Suckers can splatter. That, they do; get past the triumphant whistle that kicks of "Chinese Braille", and you're left with a pretty standard-issue mid-tempo pop-rocker that wouldn't be out of character for the likes of Ben Folds or pre-opera Rufus Wainwright. "Bricks to Bones" has a nice bend-and-build to it, and "Lydia" is a rousing ballad that captures some of the glass-in-the-air, last-minutes-of-prom feel of "Body". Sonically, obvious single "Turn on the Sunshine" is among the busiest of the bunch, yet the song, underneath all its intemperate intricacy, is something of a breeze. Topping relatively straightforward songwriting with busy production has a tendency to topple over, but to Suckers' credit, the pairing mostly works; in complicating its sounds rather than its songs, Candy Salad's an easy, inviting listen with plenty of rewards for the closely cocked ear.
A few of the fuller-throated ballads aside, Walker and (especially) Austin Fisher's love-'em-or-leave-'em vocals-- a popular source of contention circa Wild Smile-- are dialed back several notches, resulting in swaths of overly polite undersinging. The trickiness of Boynton's production helps Suckers breeze through the lesser moments, but at times Suckers seem to be busying stuff up simply because they can; the tunes underneath seem strong enough to stand on their own, though that's not always easy to see through the dressing up they're given. More than once, I've found myself absentmindedly whistling the towering lead-in to "Chinese Braille" or a snatch of swooping harmony from any number of these songs; the actual verses and choruses, while solid enough, aren't nearly as memorable as the stuff surrounding them. And, with many of the songs topping out over five minutes, they've got plenty of room to elaborate, though with much of that effort spent on instrumental left-turns, the more straightaway songs get to feeling like awfully long hauls around minute four. The richly produced, melodically generous Candy Salad is plenty to chew on, but one can't help wishing its songs could be as vibrant as its sounds.
