The Candles - Between the Sounds
Rating
RIYL
Ben KwellerThe Strokes
The Lemonheads
Tinted Windows
Release Date
04/13/2010
Label
The End RecordsTracklist
1. Waiting for the Truth2. Here or Gone
3. Let Me Down Easy
4. Anywhere Tonight
5. Not Enough
6. Between the Sounds
7. On My Side
8. Who We Are
9. Road Song
10. Life Will Shine
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I’d never heard of The Candles before doing this review, but the bio really spoke to me. Between the Sounds is the debut album from The Candles, which consists of New York-based multi-instrumentalist Josh Lattanzi. Lattanzi is a long-time ace-in-the-hole who has credits with some very prominent groups and performers. Having recorded and toured with Nina Gordon (Veruca Salt), Ben Kweller, Albert Hammond Jr. (The Strokes), and supergroup Tinted Windows (among others), Lattanzi comes into this project with a very impressive pedigree. After having listened to this album, however, I’m left cold.
The album starts off with a great sense of purpose and gives the closest sense of what Mr. Lattanzi is capable of creating. The densely arranged opener “Waiting for the Truth” comes roaring out of the gate as a wonderfully driving pop song that has a lot of production tricks. I’m thinking that his time working with über-producer Adam Schlesinger when dealing with the bands Tinted Windows and Ivy influenced this song with its goofy synthesizer sounds and airy background vocals. Then “Here or Gone” follows in the same vein as a well-crafted propulsive pop song that could have been recorded by Ben Kweller. Great harmonies and a decent bridge mark this song. It becomes apparent that The Candles can put out good music when Lattanzi really puts the time into it, but it is at about this point that he starts to lose me.
In an interview Lattanzi said that this record was made over a ten day period of 16 hour recording sessions with producer John Kent. During this time, they lived off of frozen pizza and beer, and I guess this is my main irritation with this album. You can tell that the first two songs had a lot of time devoted to them because they were so inventive and energetic. But the rest of the album has a “good-enough” feeling to it, not in the fact that the songs are bad or poorly played, but when compared to the beginning of the album, the rest of the album feels unfinished. If he had gotten away from the recording sessions for one or two days and came back later to add finishing touches, this could have been such a better album.
That is a real shame, because this is the kind of album that I could get into sound-wise, with simply written songs using acoustic guitars strummed to an electric backing. It's very Tom Petty-like, very much like what he’d have to create while doing the album alone (with the exception of Smashing Pumpkins and Tinted Windows guitarist James Iha contributing to “Anywhere Tonight”). Obviously, recording alone you cannot jam with yourself, so the songs tend to be more concise and formulaic, which is not a problem in itself, but by sticking with laid-back tempos for most of the album it becomes incumbent for the production and arrangements to be as interesting as the form of the song itself. Lattanzi did not spend the extra time to give each song a strong personality.
I have hope for the future of The Candles. I like the sound of this album and I’ve seen what The Candles are capable of producing when given enough time. I just hope that Lattanzi takes his next album more seriously. If he does, we could be hearing The Candles on heavy rotation on alternative radio.
--David Toothman
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