I’m always one to admit when we’re topped.
To wit, someone’s finally contextualized the weird and sudden rise to blog-fame of Glass Candy. That someone is the single greatest and most must-read-on-a-daily-basis-or-you’re-missing-something ‘zine, Fader.
I’ve had a Glass Candy fetish for awhile, and it was cemented a few years back when Hacks, R Jamz and I saw them in all their fractured rock fairy tale glory. Now, with the Fader article, I finally understand why-they really are a different breed.
For over a decade Johnny Jewel and Ida No have been producing dance music of the “rock,” “electro” or “italo disco” variety. Originally written off as no-talent art punks with glamorous aspirations, Glass Candy did the seemingly unthinkable—they kept their band together and morphed into something sublime. Fans, friends and industry associates all describe the pair as elusive, shy, flaky and standoffish. People in Portland seem to either love them or hate them with a feverish intensity. But most agree Glass Candy’s recent surge in popularity is a long time coming—and it could have come much earlier, had they ever actually given a shit.
-FADER writer T Cole Rachel
The Fader 53 piece on Ida No and Johnny Jewel places the duo as rogues in the current overfilled dance-rock climate, and it makes me love them (Glass Candy AND Fader) even more. The thought that I’ll never have to listen to a craptastic Diplo remix of “Life After Sundown” enables me to swoon over the original even more. In fact
Glass Candy: Life After Sundown (12′ Mix)
This is from the original 12″ release, which I prefer to the re-recorded (and less raw) B/E/A/T/B/O/X version. I know it’s en vogue to view anything sounding remotely Moroder-scented as a “roller skate jam”, but I feel it’s that exact label that’s cheapened the feel of some of the best, most sublime, iced-sex italo-disco. This IS the sound of late night: pensive, tense, chilled. Removed, solitary and alone. Like Ida herself says, “the only thing right the streetlight/the only thing wrong is the blood in my veins”. It still sounds as fresh as the first time I heard it, and with good reason-as the Fader piece states, what puts Glass Candy (and Jewel’s other band the ghostly Chromatics, who had another “best album of 2007 I never wrote about” in Night Drive) in their own league is their authenticity. This music wasn’t created “to be remixed by James Murphy” or “for right now”-it was created because it had to be, and forever.
Now go. Read that Fader piece. I’d give my literacy to have written that.
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