Candy Coffins - Seaside Girls (self-released)

As a second taster of the album to come, Once Do It With Feeling, “Seaside Girls” is helping to put up a compelling argument that this is an album you will need to buy as soon as it drops. And again, just like the previous single, “Every Day a New Atrocity”, they display a fantastic ability to make the dark and heavy melodic and accessible, the deep and meaningful infectious and addictive. And that is a hard thing to do. Usually, artists working with such rich weaves come across as po-faced and overly severe. Those ploughing more melodic furrows often seem lightweight and thrown away.

“Seaside Girls” is, therefore, a great balancing act, walking a fine line between the serious and the sassy, the underground and the commercial, the deep and the danceable.

Coming out of a creative choice to write something lighter against the backdrop of the early days of covid and lockdown, after all, if the natural urge is to reflect the encroaching dark and difficult times, why not challenge yourself to go another way? And the result is “Seaside Girls”, a relatively fun and frivolous song when compared to some of the band’s output but still driven by the dark musical designs that fall naturally from the band. And that’s the whole point. Opposites can be really attractive. The same contradictory forces drive songs such as The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love” and look how well that turned out.

It’s easy to tag bands like Candy Coffins as a goth or post-punk or alt-rock band, but every time you do, they will pull out a chiming and charming pop-infused piece like this s if to say…“ Ha, we are not going to play your game” and make you go and rethink your argument. I like people who do that; they are my kind of people.

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Every Day A Fresh Atrocity’
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