Sugar in the Raw, Like Candy to the Brain

An older, wiser friend once told me to be wary of anyone who overused the phrase "at the end of the day" to introduce a profound thought. I'd add to that, be wary of profound thoughts in general. Especially in pop music. Profundity should be subtle; it comes when you least expect it. And if you can see it all too clearly, then it's a fraud.

When Mike Viola sings, "At the end of the day / All roads lead back home" on the Candy Butchers' latest release, the phrase loses its pretension and sets a course for the rest of the record. Play With Your Head, a set of eleven beautifully crafted songs by this New York-based trio, escapes the trap of contrivance by digging deeper into your own experience than you realize when it's happening to you, and distracting you with sweet guitar riffs, just-rough-enough vocals, and all too human stories of love, loss, ego, obsession, and heartbreak. This is not ground-breaking music, but by the end of the record the Candy Butchers will have you bopping your head and shaking other parts even as they tell you things you didn't want to hear about yourself. At the end of the day comes profundity after all.

Like the character from one of his songs, Viola has got the big idea. In "Ruby's Got a Big Idea," the protagonist comes to town with "a barrel of laughs" and by the end of the song is leaving town for lack of an audience. About a man who retains his "big idea" through it all, "Ruby" reflects Viola's own role in the making of this record. As the mastermind behind the Candy Butchers, Viola has found a way, which few songsters do these days, to make what I can't help but call a holistic record. From the instrumental layers he creates, to the stories he tells, to the order in which he presents the songs, Viola has had a complete thought. Records like this remind me that, in an era when random song lists play on every college kid's laptop, there is still a reason to buy CDs. These songs belong together. Even though each one has its own punch line, its compelling lyric, its catchy riff, they are made complete in arrangement with the others.

Mike Viola's voice is perhaps the most compelling explanation for why Play With Your Head stands as such a complete thought. It is refreshing to hear such subtle emotion from a lead singer; the emotional tug on the listener is all the greater for it. In terms of its variability, this voice is like a chameleon, sounding like some blend of Elvis Costello and Rocket From the Crypt frontman Speedo on "Tough Hang", but more like Bono or Sting (in a good way, I assure you) on "I Let Her Get Away". The dimension in Viola's vocals propels one song into the next--there are no jolting transition from song to song because Viola has an impressive ability to mix the guttural with the languid, the scream with the sweet talk, and the la-las with well thought out poetry.

At prep school weekend retreats--meant to be bonding experiences but ultimately pretty brutal, we used to play the trust game. Someone stood atop a pole six feet up and fell backwards, stiff as a board, into the arms of his or her sometimes-friends. The key to making this painless was for the group on the ground to make a zipper patter with their arms; this, we were told, was the strongest way to link our limbs and keep the falling body suspended above the ground. The instrumental parts on this record zip together in a similar way to form a secure melodic foundation from which Viola can launch his vocals. Pete Donnelly's bass and Mike Levesque's drums make Viola's guitar shine and the music is bright and energetic, even at the songs' most somber. The closest this record comes to breaking new musical ground is with "My Heart Isn't In It." Overlapping voices sing, "Can't get with no program / Wanna answer to no man / But my heart isn't in it," and plod on to the accompaniment of a lone synthesizer until a string section comes in (a grand addition) and slowly fades. A guitar then replicates the theme the strings have just established. But then these instruments disappear, and all that's left are brilliant lyrics and an irritating synthesizer. Maybe that's the point. Fleshing some of these songs out with parts like the string section would be mesmerizing, as it is in "My Monkey Made a Man Out of Me." Possibly the band's most successful integration of comfortable melodies and unexpected sounds, the sitar-like riff from the introduction repeats throughout the song as Viola sings, "I'm bigger than I was before," over and over again. We're left to figure out just what he means.

A record with a good love song is hard to resist. A record with three is even harder. Or is it five? The intriguing part of Viola's songs is that love is not an isolated experience. As in life, it exists as only part of a much greater story. Whether or not you can tell if the songs are about love for all time or love gone wrong, "You Belong To Me," "Baby, It's a Long Way Down," and "I Let Her Get Away" are much more complicated than Britney Spears' brand of love. Though touching, they are not saccharine sweet; they are more like sugar in the raw. This love hurts, but that's what gives it substance.

In trying to understand why I had to listen to this record on repeat at work, at home, and in the subway, I realized that there is a simplicity in the music that initially drew me in, and once I was in I heard (and kept coming back for) the dimension of the music, the subtlety of the stories. The blessed thing about Play With Your Head is that the components fit so gently, so stunningly together. At the end of the day, the Candy Butchers are preserving pop music as a respectable genre and Mike Viola has pushed the bounds of the genre, if timidly.