My girlfriend doesn’t appreciate the Candy Claws live experience. “They just stand there,” she says.
Considering the consistent warmth of their music, it’d be natural to expect big toothy grins flashing throughout a performance. But since their earliest performances in Fort Collins basements, Candy Claws, despite obtaining more human members, has grown progressively less humanistic. (That doesn’t just pertain to their music: In press photos, they mask themselves in vivid splashes of nature). In person, the eight members seem to share a relatively quiet demeanor. At this point, to expect them to show great emotion would make as much sense as walking up to a woodpecker and expecting a chuckle.
Hidden Lands, their “forest” album, continues the devolution. Like their full-length debut, this follow-up is a musical companion to a book: Richard Ketchum’s The Secret Life of The Forest, from which the band used a English-to-Japanese translation website to transform its passages into lyrics.
It opens with the enchanting ambiance of “In the Deep Time”, before announcing “Sunbeam Show” with bird-call synths. The soft vocals of Kay Bertholf and Ryan Hover are hard to make out, barely ascending layers of poignant sound but meshing particularly well in “On The Bridge” and the wintery “Silent Time of Earth.”
If there are any human qualities expressed here, perhaps it’s feelings of discovery. None of Lands’ tracks have the immediacy of “Catamaran”, but it doesn’t take many repeat listens to realize their mysterious beauty.
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