Once Do It With Feeling. Candy Coffins

The band name Candy Coffins has popped up in the singles section of this blog in the recent past. Today it's time for the album. Once Do It With Feeling fully deserves the spotlight, as it successfully spans a bridge between the past and today. The 80s wave atmosphere meets an urgency that is important to feel in 2023. The time for hedonistic abandon is over, it's time for action in a number of fields, whether world peace, climate change, energy transition, fighting fascism or inequality. 2023 should be that kind of year.

In that sense it's a disappointment that Candy Coffins sings "Help me, 'cause I'm feeling lonely", to a background of 80s synthsounds coming right out of the best 80s songs, like 'Wishing', '(Feels Like) Heaven', etc. Let me imagine the wailing lead guitar, showing great urgency, is all about what really ought to occupy our minds in these troubling times.

Besides a complaint about the kind of individualism that will have us all killed, Candy Coffins surprises me with an album that is jumping out of my speakers. Sure, the sound is overly familiar. The references of The Cure, The Afghan Wigs and other greats of the 80s and 90s are all well understood and taken in stride. Ask me and there's not one album between them tipping on what I'm hearing here.

Admittedly, there's not a hit single like 'A Forest' or 'Just Like Heaven' on Once Do It With Feeling' but then The Cure in my opinion never produced an album of this quality overall. Jame Lathram's voice is good and dark, belonging to this music. The "bats" would have dug this, but also more rock and more pop and punk inclined music fans would have. Candy Coffins strikes a lot of right notes here.

Promo Photo: Lauren Ellis

What attracts me, is the mix of 80s bleakness with superb melodies and rocking guitar in most songs. Candy Coffins are five men, all of a certain age, who, most likely, started to play their instruments somewhere in the 1980s but have picked up influences in their earlier youth and are young enough to have appreciated the new rock bands coming out of the U.S. around 1990 and the Britpop of the U.K. a few years later. This all can be heard on Once Do It With Feeling. A Rich Robinson, John Squire and Noel Gallagher style solo?, master guitarist Tom Alewine (what's in a name?) has it all down, not to forget a lot of his own as well. This combination with the dark bass and exciting synths, is exactly what I missed with most bands in the 1980s (and almost never came to the other side of an album).

Putting little pieces of the puzzle together is all nice, it draws away from Candy Coffins' own achievement. This is an album that rocks on the darker side of new wave. In part because of Lathram's timbre and backing sound, often compensated by the clear sound of Alewine's guitar. Single 'Seaside Girls' already came by in October. (In fact the album was released then as well, I just noticed.) It shows how this band can rock in a tight way with a keen ear for small details like the few piano notes gracing the song. The contrast with the next song, the far slower 'Abject' is huge, but notice the power and the nice 80s feel of the organ. It is exactly this combination with makes the whole album a winner in my book.

Wout de Natris

You can listen to and order Once Do It With Feeling here:

https://candycoffins.bandcamp.com/album/once-do-it-with-feeling