Candy Whips, Artificial Melodies (Kitten Robot Records)
This northern California fivesome label their stuff ‘’post-glam” or “accidental goth,” the latter of which is more fitting in my opinion. It’s quite angular, this; to me the tldr description would be Gang of Four sitting around smoking joints with Lord Of The New Church, what with the ’80s-cheesing, mellotron-emulating synth; the resolute, minimalist guitar-chonking and the Stiv Bator vocals of (male) vocalist Wendy Stonehenge. Formulaically, the recipe calls for an Aughts-era verse-bridge structure in the vein of early Cure and such, that is to say the tunes want to take us someplace but don’t always arrive, and yet the journey is nevertheless pleasant enough (that’s especially true of “A Drop Will Do,” an alcoholism-admission story that’s the most phoned-in-sounding thing on board). But there are a lot of cool things in this set, such as “Strange Taste,” with its urgent, no-wave-ish anti-riff. Melodically on point, only rarely bogged down with performative subtlety. A
Kilmara, Journey To The Sun (RPM Records)
The rise of “melodic power metal” is in sync with the same epic-ness we hear in nearly every musical genre nowadays (save for indie of course, whose soil’s been depleted since the 1980s owing to the majority of its bands having more disposable recording money than actual artistry). People don’t have time nor patience for buildup anymore; they want the show-stopping mega-melody now or they go back to social media. We’ve heard it for years from emo-rock bands, pop divas, etc. and now it’s even on the big screen: A year from now, no one will remember that aside from “Defying Gravity” the soundtrack to Wicked is pretty awful (a friend remarked on Bluesky that Stephen Schwartz hasn’t written a decent score since 1970’s Godspell). Unlike Wicked, the fifth album from this Barcelona, Spain-based quintet, is wall-to-wall showstoppers, but sorry folks, sometimes you just have to wait for the big hook-gasm. In other words, conceptually and musically, it’s a fine tracing from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra template, but with more speed when they feel like going for it. I could picture some of this stuff bringing a tear to some metal-head’s eye; such a funny, funny world we live in now. A
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• On Dec. 13, a few new albums will come out and be dumped into the Spotifies and the retail stores that carry music CDs for purchase, do stores even do that anymore? I suppose they do, particularly stores that sell vinyl albums for 1890s Victrola record-playing machines, because they know that certain people fancy themselves as “audiophiles”; they enjoy listening to vinyl records so that they can hear mistakes in old recordings, like they like to go “Woop! Hear that, Petunia? Ringo hit the rim of the snare drum, not the head, lolol, he must have been drunk on the reefers, you know?” No, I’m just funnin’ with you vinyl junkies; by now everyone knows that CDs simply can’t capture many frequencies, like the sound of unintentional rimshots by Ringo or the dulcet tones of groupies power-barfing in the booth; instead, all the sounds get squished together in an aural trash compactor, so the only way you can detect that Jimmy Page has too much treble on his guitar (didn’t he always?) is to suffer through the vinyl versions of 55-year-old Led Zeppelin songs! Speaking of Ringo Starr, he has a new country album coming out Jan. 10, called Look Up, but I’ll save the snarky CSI on that for later, since chances are there won’t be much else for me to talk about in this award-winning column during the first two weeks of the new year. In the meantime, we can point and laugh at Snoop Dogg, whose new album is out this Friday. It is titled Missionary, because Snoop actually invented sex during the time of the pharaohs, and it is produced by famous producing producer Dr. Dre, because why not! One of the singles, “Another Part of Me,” features Police bassist and tantric-sexytime man Sting; the tune borrows Outkast’s steez, reimagining the Police’s “SOS” as a shuffle tune with lyrics about living in L.A. and dealing with people shooting at you because they’re bored or whatever. It’s actually a marked improvement over the original (I know, I know).
• Wait, don’t run off yet, here’s one that’s awesome, a posthumous album from a rapping feller I actually like, DMX! We all know that the D-Man was always big into spittin’ about his faith on his first six-or-so albums, but on this new one, Let Us Pray: Chapter X, there’s more prayin’ than rappin’! Grammy award-winning producer Warryn Campbell set DMX’s prayers to music for the first time on this groundbreaking project that fuses hip-hop to gospel; it includes features from Killer Mike, Snoop, LeCrae and MC Lyte. In “Favor,” DMX thanks the lord for blessing him with fame and such; there’s straight-up praying and some trademark rhyming, super cool stuff.
• I assume you may not know much about British indie-dance act Saint Etienne despite their being around for nearly 35 years. Their trip is blending velvet-rope dance stuff with ’60s pop and whatnot, but on “Daydream,” the single for their latest LP, The Night, you’ll hear straight-ahead trance stuff a la Oceanlab. It’s great, you should listen to it.
• We’ll end the week with Rome, the new live album from Cincinnati, Ohio, post-punk revival band The National! Includes a version of the (very) Kings Of Leon-like “I Need My Girl,” a sad and mawkish rawk ballad that may move you, I don’t know for sure.
