Don't Pollute the City Rock Thread (aka If You Wanna Talk About Glass Candy...)

[DJ Rick]

i have most of the Glass Candy records!! they were punk in the early days you know!!

I'd ban you if I still had the power to do so.

The punkest thing about Glass Candy was when Wrangler Brutes covered "Love Love Love", and it totally ripped. Also, there was that one Glass Candy tour when the main two were backed by a rhythm section including Andy Coronado, and that unexpectedly ripped and totally redeemed them from their last tour which featured fake-sounding drums played on a discman that skipped everytime people danced too hard near it. To this day, I still cringe at the thought of Glass Candy telling their fans not to dance too hard in a specified area near the stage.

I did always like the early singles and first tour CDR/demo thing. And the live show....warts and all. Warts mainly were everytime 2nd-drummer Melanie played a drum roll...or certain moments of overly self-conscious reactions to a guitar riff gone sideways or a little squall of feedback. Quite perfectionistic, that Johnny! It seems natural how he let his music become more electronic to reduce the margin of error....just like Stephen Morris being only too willing to let himself get replaced by a drum machine to the point where he actually reveled in it.

Glass Candy were a frustrating band to follow sometimes 'cos the tour-only demos sometimes hinted at the potential of a really good record, but they never pulled it off over an entire record. Or even half record. If you took the best songs of their tour-only demos--all beautifully packaged in what could be described as a disco-accessible homage to Portland's late 70s/early 80s godfather of punk graphics, Mark Sten--you could actually make a thoroughly listenable "greatest hits" record, and that's not me just being generous although you probably think so. Try culling just from the official releases...maybe you can make a greatest hits EP with four songs on it. And that probably is being generous.

It's been years since I could tolerate more than a few minutes of their records, but I would still jump at the chance to bring them here for a live show. Reflexive haters think they look like vapid cosmetics counter people, but they are pretty cool.

[rutabowa]

and totally redeemed them from their last tour which featured fake-sounding drums played on a discman that skipped everytime people danced too hard near it.

ha i like them even more!
i did like that first album. i woud like to hear these tour things. then i also like the stuff they do now but i thought it was a different band, i only put it together once i had both records in my house one day. actually that first album, you can only listen to about 8 minutes of it at a time before hurling it across the room, but those 8 minutes are pretty fun!

[DJ Rick]

Please keep posting here!

You are helping me shed the stigma of being the TermBo with the most forgiving taste that I got somehow.

[rutabowa]

i am not even being forgiving too them i just kind of like them!
i liked that first album since someone played it on wfmu whenever it was out... then i got into the late stuff when i had a brief "italo disco" period because it got trendy for about a minute so i had to check it out.
my band used to have drums on a discman that skipped to random points of the song whenever there was any loud noise (maybe when people danced too, but there never was anybody dancing).