If you want to call Candy Claws a bunch of hippies, they don’t have much of a defense-- they live in Fort Collins, Col., a college town in a state that legalized recreational marijuana, and about 98% of their Twitter account is dedicated to documenting the boundless beauty of Mother Earth. On their last album, 2010's Hidden Lands, the music refracted early Animal Collective and late Mercury Rev through a reverbed cloudbank and they generated lyrics by refracting the words of Richard M. Ketchum's The Secret Life of the Forest through a translation program. Their new LP is not only granted the title Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time, it’s also "the story of Ceres, a seal-like beast, and Calypso, her human partner, as they travel through the Mesozoic Era." Oh, and each of the band's three members plays a different character, with leader Ryan Hover as "The Deep Time." When they give a rare interview, Hover might say something like, “We just say [we're] Dream Pop because I’m a dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period dreaming I’m a human in a band in 2013.” Trippy.
But they are an actual dream-pop band on Ceres, as the most notable additions Candy Claws have made since Hidden Lands are definition and structure; while maintaining the same wondrous perspective and amorphous textures, these are more likely to be considered “songs” than soundscapes. And it turns out Candy Claws have a knack for pop construct, as “Transitional Bird (Clever Girl)” and “White Seal (Shell & Shine)” boast swelling, immediate psych rock hooks that bloom from their earthy verses, countering the unwieldiness of their titles. It allows them a proper showcase for their unusual, intuitive melodic sense-- their chord progressions are deliberate and surefooted, but each turn tends to take a step or two beyond what’s expected. It’s either the result of super-advanced knowledge of music theory or none at all; considering Candy Claws made it a point to create Hidden Lands on instruments with which they had no formal training whatsoever, it must be the latter.
Whereas Hidden Lands defied definition and either drew you in from the beginning or not at all, Candy Claws’ disparate interests are allowed to exist as individual tracks here, creating numerous re-entry points and strange innovations: spaghetti western with a 90% chance of rain, the tropical psych adventures of Os Mutantes relocated to the bedroom of a landlocked teen. Often, Ceres sounds like the first legitimately happy shoegaze record. “Birth of the Flower (Seagreen)” is something like My Bloody Valentine performing “To Here Knows When” at an island resort.
Yet the same fanciful approach to the actual, physical recording of the music doesn’t do Ceres justice. It’s an immersive listening experience, but also a claustrophobic one. There’s flow, though a curious lack of dynamics as so much of it is taken up by midrange. The layers upon layers of whispering vocals and airy synths turns Ceres into a surprisingly loud and brittle listen, a brickwall covered in gauze. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to imagine Dave Fridmann or Ben H. Allen taking a flier on these guys and rounding out the low end, after helping Flaming Lips, MGMT, Youth Lagoon and Washed Out fuse nature-boy naivety with studio nerd fervor into something festival-ready. But on the other hand, Ceres could’ve just easily benefited from a more holistic production along the lines of Animal Collective ca. Sung Tongs, stripping away the reverb and countermelodies to let things breathe.
Ceres & Calypso is certainly one of 2013’s more unique records, which is even more impressive considering how many of its precedents and peers are some of indie rock’s more populist acts. It’s a strange situation where you wish they treated their passions more like a career-- the leap in songwriting promises an advance, but the decision to record it in the same way as the billowing, freeform Hidden Lands makes it feel like a missed opportunity. It all leads to Ceres & Calypso feeling like concrete evidence of their hippie cred, chock full of fantastic ideas and lacking just enough follow through.
