BEAT HAPPENING: BLACK CANDY (1989)
1) Other Side; 2) Black Candy;
3) Knick Knack; 4) Pajama Party In A Haunted Hive; 5) Gravedigger Blues; 6)
Cast A Shadow; 7) Bonfire; 8) T.V. Girl; 9) Playhouse; 10) Ponytail.
Our 10-/12-/14-year old continues to grow up,
and now he seems to be entering a mean streak — about half of the songs here
have dark overtones, be it the bass riffs, Calvin's ever-lowering vocals, or
lyrics that tend to drift into the spooky-scary corner of the absurd. Not that
this is «goth» or Alice Cooper stuff, but at this point in the life of the
protagonist, I'd stay away from him if you were a girl, because he is liable,
you know, to drop a spider in your panties or something. "Drip my blood /
Fall in love / Chew my cud / Mess my head" does not look very appetizing
as a replacement for the simplistic romancing of the first two albums.
I am very much tempted to write these thirty
minutes off by saying that the joke finally got too old, and that's it — on the
other hand, the songs continue to be moderately catchy, and this new darker
vibe counts for progress, so I guess it would be more honest to admit that by
1989 Beat Happening still had not completely outlived their initial purpose.
Not that I seriously want to talk about these songs. For one thing, it's
frustrating that Heather only gets to sing lead once, on the twee-cutesy ʽKnick
Knackʼ, whose repetitive, but seductive and optimistic refrain of "you see
a ghost, I see a halo" contrasts nicely with Calvin's gloominess — it's as
if she was allowed, just once, to make a retort and used this opportunity to
provide a bright, reassuring, idealistic feminine counterpoint to Calvin's
dark brooding masculinity (a yin-yang role reversal!). But one song out of ten?
She may not be the technically better singer of the two, but at least she's the
nice one.
For another thing, what is there to talk about, really? I could mention that ʽOther
Sideʼ opens the album with a melody that is very similar to Zappa's ʽWowie
Zowieʼ, and that this may not be a total coincidence (Freak Out! had its fair share of intentional «childishness» as
well), but other than that, well, you see, it no longer has that freshness and
strangeness of approach — it sounds more serious than anything they've done
before, enough to dispel the aura of «innocent young teen delightfully failing
in his sincere artistic inclinations», yet not serious enough to wow or stun
you with its melodic potential or unique atmosphere. Honestly, I am not sure
that I really need Beat Happening if I want someone to invoke me to "let's
find a way to the other side" — plenty of people in the psychedelic era
did this more convincingly.
Some stuff here is just plain misguided — the
finger-click-accompanied ʽGravedigger Bluesʼ, for instance, sounds like an
inane parody on Nick Cave; it could be funny if only the singing wasn't so
terribly offkey, but as it is, it is not. ʽPlayhouseʼ finally adds an agenda of
sexual innuendos to what used to be a much more chaste approach, and for that
reason, also sounds more like a self-parody than a serious statement. The
pseudo-surf rock ʽBonfireʼ and the pseudo-Stooges ʽPajama Party In A Haunted
Hiveʼ sound more like frustratingly incomplete genre exercises than intellectual
deconstructions of their respective genres — I understand that the difference
is fleeting and subjective, but I just don't feel any enticing atmospherics
here.
In other words, they are trying to make some progress without abandoning the core
ideology, but there's only so much you can achieve when your starting capital
consists of not knowing how to play or sing and not being afraid to use that
lack of knowledge. Think of Black Candy
as the band's "We wet our beds, but we want to be Jim Morrison!"
record or something — maybe that'll help. At least it's nice to know that it is
still no longer than thirty minutes.
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