The digital age has afforded audiences a great amount of privilege, a leeway often taken for granted in the music industry. Once, there was a time where the mainstream was the mainstream, a single highway to popularity and success aided by the confines of mediums like radio, MTV and records or CDs. However, in the internet age, everything goes. The confines of reaching an audience are shattered, niche is the new norm and nearly any band or artist can now feasibly reach their own people by their own means.
Often overlooked in this data dump are the Colorado psychedelic pop group Candy Claws, made up of members Ryan Hover,Karen Hover and Hank Bertholf. The group’s trademark sound is at once gargantuan and intimate, channeling the Wall of Sound approach pioneered by Phil Spector in the sixties with the warped bubblegum pop-rock sheen of nineties shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive. The group was active for roughly eight years in the mid-2000’s and disbanded in 2015, but not before leaving audiences with their masterwork, “Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time.”
Up until this point, the group had worked carefully to establish a sound, one rooted in a Do-It-Yourself spirit that merged distorted rock and folk stylings with lyrics that touched on natural history, local folklores and classical, myth-like storytelling. All of these elements fused together on this 2013 monolith of a project. The album’s composition is an outlier story, and an unlikely one at that. Collegiate poet Jenn Morea had set out to fuse poetry inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s work. As luck would have it, she discovered the debut album from Candy Claws “In the Dream of the Sea Life,” which drew inspiration from just that, specifically Carson’s award-winning book “The Sea Around Us.” What is left is a rock album that lyrically tells the story of a young girl and her pet seal traveling through the Mesozoic Era, with allusions to Roman and Greek gods and goddesses along the way.
If this seems heavy-handed with context and lore, look no further than the music itself. The songs on this album are heavy yet addicting oddyseys through electronic rhythms, swelling guitars, DIY foley sounds, and hushed, whispered vocals, often all happening at once. The experience is intoxicating to say the least, without needing to pay any attention to the story within the lyrics. Take track four, “Pangea Girls (Magic Feeling),” a blast of Beach Boys era pop with a modern twist. The following “New Forest (Five Heads of the Sun)” builds off of a rolling rock riff that crescendoes with each loop. The band’s versatility comes to the forefront with the track “Night Ela (Mystic Thing),” a slow-burn electronic pop ballad that sinks into a club-ready groove in the final leg of the track.
The standard edition of this album on streaming services features a second disk of the album’s instrumentals, highlighting the mixed-media approach to the recording. The lyrics stand on their own as a work of poetry, combined with the actual music itself, another medium entirely. Take the opening verse of “Fell in Love (At the Water):” “Zigzag of dragonflies / Deep rises of light in uneven wings / Brown and green / Shallow stream / New sudden life arrives / At the edge to drink.” Rock music and literature have never sounded so good together.
In this age of the endless scroll and mass media advertising, take a minute to find the hidden gems beneath. Ceres and Calypso do not disappoint, even thousands of years in the deep time.
