"Classical music's making a summer comeback," Candy Bars' Daniel Martinez scream-whispers at one point during On Cutting Ti-Gers in Half and Understanding Narravation, the Tampa-based dream-pop trio's debut. The album even opens with a minuet, and then wanders through winter mists of harpsichord, classical guitar, and nightmare cello. In other words, it's almost as pretentious as it sounds-- a cramped bedchamber's Renaissance rejoinder to Band of Horses' keening big-sky sweep.
Almost, but not quite. Meta-reference, set-piece titles, and shroom-faerie orchestras may put Candy Bars' songs in intellectual context, but the weird, desperate romance of the most poignant pop gives them their heart. "Your heartbeat is as average as a lie/ I hear you're having trouble sleeping at night," Martinez sings on "Violets", a chiming acoustic lullaby comparable to fellow Floridian Iron & Wine-- at least until electric guitar and sleighbell swoop in for a festival-ready chorus. Melissa Castellano's cello throbs in sympathy as Martinez bitterly confronts a lover's lies on "The Flood in Your Old Town", set on edge by drummer Ryan Hastings' sighing cymbals. This is sad, freezing stuff, belying the band's sunny hometown.
Ultimately, Candy Bars' idiosyncrasies tend to reinforce their emotionally fraught compositions. "I wanted to create depressing heroin pop," goes one self-congratulatory lyric from "Works Cited", which opens with martial drumrolls. Still, rather than collapse beneath its own portentousness, this song sleepwalks through the band's horror-film imagination. Just when the carnival-folk foreboding seems exhausted, the villain comes back to life in the final minute. Later, "Enough to Choke a Cold Air" veers between stormy Southern rock verses and multitracked Elliott Smith choruses, as Martinez paints from an equally diverse palette of images: Moses, "skyscrapers, bookshelves, milk cartons," and brown bears. In short, this isn't your neighbor's band bearding up after downloading You Forgot It in People.
Martinez's voice cuts through even when the words are shrouded in reverb, a lost boy peering out from a haunted forest. His hushed, Jeremy Enigk-like anguish has the maniacal glint of a cartoon crone, but it grounds even Candy Bars' gassiest ideas-- like uncharacteristically banal "The Birthday Song" or incidental-noise dirge "The Basque Country"-- in immediacy. "What cuts you is what's good," Martinez explains. Haw haw so if emo is classical nowadays, next they'll be...
