Some bands pootle along in the background for album after album without anyone but their devoted fans appreciating their wares. Such outfits spend years in the shadows of majority culture, but very slowly, through friend sharing with friend, they can occasionally, eventually gather enough momentum to drift into popular consciousness. From Modest Mouse to Biffy Clyro to Flaming Lips, these artists are enjoyably unlikely rock stars for our Facebook eye-food age. Mice Parade have not yet reached such a tipping point (and possibly never will) but if their profile is ever to rise, Candela might be the album to give them that little extra push.
The band are the project of New Yorker Adam Pierce and have been around since the late Nineties. Initially they bridged post-rock, noise-electronic terrain, tipping their hats to the swirling, fine-tuned distortion of My Bloody Valentine and God Speed You Black Emperor, but in more recent years there’s been a distinct effort, via Pierce’s serious academic pursuit of ethnomusicology, to make more accessible music, perhaps even Mice Parade’s very own version of pop.
Thus Candela, their seventh album, offers a broad selection of musical flavours across its 10 tracks, with a real and welcome jazz-funk feel to its percussion for most of the time and plenty of actual songs. The title track is a joyful salute to Hispanic gypsy bar flavours, “Look See Dream Me” is a prog-rocker’s version of easy listening and the cutesy-funk groove of “Contessa” is very cool and lovely. “The Chill House”, meanwhile, musters the charm of midnight in an old world opium den, all plucked orientalism and haziness. Elsewhere there are the requisite walls of guitar, but often interspersed with complicated jazzy rhythms. Candela, in other words, boasts originality and, while occasionally more erudite than more-ish, when it hits the right buttons, it really nails something unique.
Listen to "Look See Dream Me" by Mice Parade
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