(2023) Candy Claws - Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time [10th Anniversary Edition]        


Review:
The tenth anniversary edition includes dual-mono edition of the album and a bonus “Distortion Spear” CD single. Colorado-based group Candy Claws formed in 2007 and first surfaced with a noisy, glitchy, and gleeful alternate soundtrack to the Werner Herzog film The White Diamond (Two Airships/Exploder Falls). Their subsequent albums took inspiration from the wonders of the natural world, with 2009 debut full-length In the Dream of the Sea Life influenced by marine biologist Rachel Carson's book The Sea Around Us, and 2010 follow-up Hidden Lands designed as a musical companion to The Secret Life of the Forest by Richard M. Ketchum. Poet Jenn Morea found In the Dream of the Sea Life while searching for music related to Carson's work, and she reached out to Candy Claws co-founder Ryan Hover. Within a couple of months, they decided to collaborate on an album together. Morea wrote poems telling the story of a girl named Calypso and a white seal named Ceres and their adventures travelling throughout the Mesozoic Era. The three members of Candy Claws each sang lyrics corresponding to different characters, with Hank Bertholf as Calypso and K Hover playing Ceres, while Ryan Hover represented the Deep Time. Even if it didn't have a complex fantasy storyline, Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time would be Candy Claws' most ambitious work based on its vast, overwhelming sound alone. While their previous efforts were enthusiastic but often messy pastiches of abstract psych-pop and dreamy electronic textures, Ceres & Calypso is a near-perfect fusion of Elephant 6-style neo-psychedelia and the blown-out heaviness of shoegaze. With help from composer Bryan Senti, who provided orchestral arrangements created from Philip Glass' sample library, the group transform the music into a towering wall of sound using extensive compression and distortion meant to evoke the effects of time dilation and fossilization upon being sent back to the Mesozoic Era. While this obscures the album's lyrics, dig deeper and a vividly expressive romance is revealed, as are colorful descriptions of the prehistoric environment. The melodic hooks stand out almost immediately, with the bleary yet bouncy "New Forest (Five Heads of the Sun)" being an instant highlight. Other songs fold in recognizable traces of exotica and baroque pop, and some nearly sound like warped spy movie themes. Ceres & Calypso is the type of album that establishes a world of its own, inspiring the listener to dive in and devote time to uncovering and interpreting every last detail of the story. After the album appeared in 2013, Candy Claws disbanded, and K and Ryan Hover expanded on the album's mixture of exotica, psychedelia, and dream pop with their subsequent band, Sound of Ceres, while Ceres & Calypso endured as a cult favorite. — allmusic


   


Track List:

Disc 1
01 - Into the Deep Time (One Sun)
02 - White Seal (Shell & Spine)
03 - Fell in Love (At the Water)
04 - Pangaea Girls (Magic Feeling)
05 - New Forest (Five Heads of the Sun)
06 - Transitional Bird (Clever Girl)
07 - Charade (Fern Prairie)
08 - Fallen Tree Bridge (Brave Rainbow Rider)
09 - Birth of the Flower (Seagreen)
10 - Illusion (Fern Lake)
11 - Night Ela (Mystic Thing)
12 - Where I Found You (One Star)
13 - Distortion Spear (Bonus Track)

Disc 2
01 - One Sun
02 - Shell & Spine
03 - At the Water
04 - Magic Feeling
05 - Five Heads of the Sun
06 - Clever Girl
07 - Fern Prairie
08 - Brave Rainbow Rider
09 - Seagreen
10 - Fern Lake
11 - Mystic Thing
12 - One Star


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, shoegaze
Country: Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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