David Candy - Play Power
(Jetset)
Ten or so years ago Ian Svenonius's band the Nation of Ulysses
appropriated many of the sounds and styles of 60s mod pop into a package
whose ostensible purpose was to demythify and destroy all previous rock
and roll music, as it had become the music of old people. It's
appropriate that now, as a certain faction of the "underground" music
world is becoming more and more satisfied to relinquish any hope of adding
anything new to the rock and roll corpse in favor of simply aping those
good old 60s pop sounds, that Svenonius would release this album under
the new name and persona of David Candy.
Play Power is a collection of very accurately represented instrumental
60s sugar pop songs which are heavily ducked in and out as David Candy
(Svenonius) reads text over them. The impression is that he's narrating a
car commercial or an educational film, not "singing" in a "band." The
subjects are assorted--diary entries, travelogues, art critiques,
recipes--and are usually very amusing if somewhat random.
The nice thing about the album is that despite the obviously derived
(possibly sampled) nature of all of the music, you've never heard anything
like it before. Svenonius plays with and completely warps the
conventional idea of what is releasable music and what is a band or a
front man, neither of which concepts seem to directly apply to this
release. Furthermore, like all his previous bands, the listener is left
with no idea how much of the concept is a pure joke, how much is serious,
and how much is the result of Svenonius just not being all there. It's
just impossible to know what to make of this new thing.
Whether it's a joke or not, and whether you actually enjoy listening to it
or not, Play Power is a reminder that there's still room to try new things
in music, that if you can't innovate by finding a new chord to play on the
guitar or a precisely new melody to sing, you can still find innovative
ways to innovate. In fact that's the only way to truly be creative.
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