Glass Candy
8 February 2011
Glass Candy
Here’s a very exotic looking sleeve image from one of my favourite bands in the world right now, Glass Candy, formerly known as Glass Candy & the Shattered Theatre… They’re a duo from Portland, Oregon and have been on the go for years – their first release was in 1999 and they apparently formed three years earlier – but only really started hitting UK shores a few years back, thanks mainly to the releases on the much-admired and beautifully executed Italians Do It Better blog-label.
Italians Do It Better was apparently set up by Johnny Jewel from the band with his friend, Mike Simonetti. Responsible for a swathe of releases influenced inspired principally by, you guessed it, Italo disco, IDIB has become a byword for hip electronic / dance music in the last few years, with Glass Candy becoming the darlings of the American indie media and, to a certain extent it would seem, the fashion industry, following the release of third album B/E/A/T/B/O/X (2007)…
One of the attributes that has made Glass Candy stand out from the mass of artists working with this kind of music is their insistence on using exclusively analogue equipment and, as any self-respecting electro hipster will tell you (before berating the advent of cheap/free computer software and its much thinner sound), this is the holy grail, really, if you’re looking for ‘that authentic analogue sound’. Actually, if you really know what you’re doing (or perhaps just have the ‘right’ soft synths), it is possible to replicate the fatter, warmer, heavier analogue sound but the majority of analogue nerds would stone anyone for imparting such travesties. Perhaps more importantly, using old synths and drum machines enables you actually to play everything fully live, relying on your own skill as a musician (not to mention each machine’s unique eccentricities – part of the pleasure, as well as often the pain, of working with analogue equipment), instead of a computer’s hard-wired capacity to express whatever it is on your behalf.
Anyway, the real point is, Glass Candy’s approach gives their music a lovely, loose, very human (some might say soulful) quality so often absent from electronic music. Check out Iko, their cover of The Dixie Cups‘ 1965 classic, Iko Iko, for an idea. Digital Versicolor is another personal favourite.
Johnny Jewel is also involved in fellow IDIB band The Chromatics, who are also pretty special and have also done the odd alluring cover: I’m on Fire. This original by them is also the bomb in their trademark spooky-noir kinda way: In the City.
You can buy almost everything both bands have released (and a few other bits of sexy merchandise) right here.
Thanks also to Toby from Svetlana Industries for inadvertently hipping me to both bands via one of his posts.
