The Tampa, FL, trio
Candy Bars offers several clues in the lyrics of the songs on its debut album,
On Cutting Ti-Gers in Half and Understanding Narravation, to suggest the kind of music it is trying to make. "We wanted to create depressing heroin pop," sings Daniel Martinez in "Works Cited." "We take overbearing chord progressions and make microscopic music," he adds in "Lovesong Lake." In truth,
Candy Bars' style isn't so much depressing, overbearing, or microscopic as it is lyrically and musically pretentious. The actual key may be that song title, "Works Cited," a hint that this is a college band in the most academic sense, one devoted to dormitory poetry with secret meanings. "Oh Moses," sings Martinez in "Enough to Choke a Cold Air," "welcome to the school of broken sorrows in some broken town like lonesome town, where the capitols of lyrics are as important as Math or English or Imagining." At least, that's what the lyric sheet says. Maybe that should be "capitals" instead of "capitols," but it still doesn't make much sense, and that could be said about most of Martinez's musings, which he expresses in a heavily filtered tenor over often melodic, pop-classical music accented by Melissa Castellano's cello and anchored by Ryan Hastings' drums. The music makes the album a pleasant-enough listen, but Martinez needs to either figure out what he's talking about or find a clearer way of saying what he wants to say if he ever expects to graduate .~ William Ruhlmann