This song by CANDY TRUCK could be likened to a post-punk take on letting the air out of a balloon. It’s guitar, drums, and electronics for this trio of NEC students/ alum. Nick Neuberg on the drums, you may know. His is a veritable cottage industry of demented and experimental sounds: PARTICULARS, AYKROYD, LOLCAT, a trio w/ Adam Foam & Andy Allen, solo as SOCIAL LADDER, and prior to all of this recent activity the duo with Nigel Taylor, DOG SUICIDE. If Nick is involved you know it’s going to be interesting. And then there’s CANDY TRUCK. caught them again the other day in Ringer Park for our FRESH AIR show, and they were fantastic. Delving into a downer post-punk vibe as a starting point, these guys (that’s AJ Durham and Robin Lohrey rounding out this killer trio) must be dialing us from a payphone in hell that is similar to that used by SEDIMENT CLUB. However, the involvement of electronics with no mothers, and lost, effects drenched vocals make sure that CANDY TRUCK’s music takes us to a separate department, on a separate floor, over @ Hell Corp. En route to the band’s cubicle quadrant, in this office megaplex of Hades, we also pass by the DEVO done Kraut-ed vibing of Boston’s LAIR, FYI. Without reference points, how do you ever make it back out of a place such as this when your interview has concluded?? Should have worn a tie?!?
“Comfort Zone” is the sole track yet handed off to the rabble, by these lords of CANDY. It is an eerie track. A sinister organ line pulls itself up from the broken guitar and percussion wasteland swamp. Deviant vocals entertain awful ideas over a minimal soundscape littered by scraping things, prodded on by a sparse devolving beat that keeps alien time. After the initial damaged guitar scrum, I mean, filling of rubber balloon with gas, said balloon is tied off. BUT, but, but we bought the cheap balloons. And there’s a minuscule leak in the balloon’s rubbery hull. It takes about five minutes for the balloon to fully void its contents, and knowing that they should call it something, they decided upon, “Comfort Zone.”
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