Candiria

The Nietzschen saying about that which does not kill you only making you stronger has particular resonance for New York five piece Candiria. Named after a life-changing event that occurred on 9 September 2002, their forthcoming album What Doesn’t Kill You…(Type A Records) is testament to the devotion of a band many fans presumed were finished. For on that day the band’s tour van was involved in a horrendous accident that left every member seriously injured, and requiring months of physical therapy to recover.

A lesser band would have given it away – left to fight yet more adversity after struggling for years. But Candiria’s positivism had been one of their strengths since their inception in 1992, and it gave them the strength to overcome this new challenge. “We lived through this and we wanted to do something different,” says bassist Michael MacIvor. “Maybe the accident was some type of gift. It takes life altering and defining moments to make you change.”

At the time of the accident Candiria were touring in support of Coma Imprint, their fifth album since 1995’s Surrealistic Madness (Too Damn Hype). While they hadn’t garnered a great deal of exposure in that period, they had slowly been building their reputation as one of the most avant-garde and imaginative heavy acts anywhere on the globe. Virtuoso musicians, they blend their heavy riffs with jazz fusion inflections, their harsh, growled vocals with Cageian aleatorics.

While this type of cross-pollination can sound trite and forced – both in description and reality – Candiria pull it off through sheer energy and force of intent. It doesn’t sound like a pose or a cool idea held back by lack of talent, for it is clear Candiria are equally adept at whatever type of music they chose to play. On their second album, 1997’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Too Damn Hype) is a straight hip hop track, ‘Mental Politics’, which would easily compete with many full-time hip hop artist’s efforts.

A Brooklyn band through and through, Candiria’s environment is no doubt the main influence on their music, hence the multiple musical styles interwoven through their output. As their career has progressed the band has became more adept at turning this internal conflict into a fluid, malleable force. But even on Surrealistic Madness (a demo which got a full release) there is a logical flow which renders the segways from hardcore riffing to heavily treated electronic noise strangely appropriate.

The final 11-minute track, ‘Red Eye Flight’ morphs into a piece by one of the band’s alter-egos, The Lovely Quartet. Recorded on four-track this segment, originally entitled ‘The Essential Victory of Free Noise’ is a piece of pure electronics that would not be amiss on a 1960’s avant-garde album, perhaps Morton Subotnick or David Tudor. It’s obvious Candiria are as equally well-versed in this stuff as they are in jazz-fusion and prog rock, name checking the likes of Chick Corea, Miles Davis, King Crimson, Sun-Ra, and of course Primus.

It’s interesting to conjecture why musicians of such fine taste would choose to put their talents towards metal, one of the more maligned musical forms thrown up by the Twentieth Century. Firstly, Candiria come in where metal fuses with hardcore, punk’s angriest and perhaps most purist extreme. This juncture offers manifold possibilities, as ably shown in different ways by the likes of Helmet and Sepultura, and DRI.

Secondly, metal has long been the domain of virtuoso musicians who also want to rock. While this has been one of the main reasons the genre is so maligned (think Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Schenker, Steve Vai, or… need I go on?), it has also resulted in some truly staggering anomalies (Primus, Death, Meshuggah). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with virtuosity – but it doesn’t fit easily into the rock’n’roll paradigm, where attitude is far more important than talent. When virtuosity becomes a genre-bound cliché, as it did with the metal guitar solo, drum solo, bass solo… arrggh, make it stop. But when it is suffused into the music, rather than being a garnish liberally scattered on top, virtuosity means all kinds of interesting angles and tangents can be explored.

Candiria excel at this, weaving their tracks through multifarious tempo changes, textures, subtleties and lack thereof. Drummer Kenneth Schalk is phenomenal, up there with Meshuggah’s outrageous Tomas Haake. His jazz permeated syncopated playing is one of Candiria’s primary strengths, and the fact that he does a great deal of the keyboard playing, writing and engineering is even more impressive.

Chief vocalist Carley Coma seems to have two settings – intense and even more intense. Needless to say he handles the vocal duties on the more hardcore tracks, growling out the uniquely verbose lyrics in a manner intended to cause grievous bodily harm. Try growling this in the shower: “Architect of the demented specimen, the volatile synthetic grin, the third eye sense, low life appearance camouflages all my vast intelligence, framework of thoughts malignant, like polluted kingpin tyrants, buried in surfactants…” Yeah, what he said.

Since Beyond Reasonable Doubt (which was repackaged as half of The Coma Imprint) Candiria have released the excellent Process of Self Development (1999) and 300 Percent Density (2001). Also in that period they have added a second guitarist, John Lamacchia, to join Eric Matthews and bassist Michael McIvor. These three are all equally capable of following whichever strand the music seems to arbitrarily follow, snapping momentarily out of a heavy riff to insert a crisp and perfectly executed jazz passage. Even on the first two albums, the precision control of tempo and texture is astounding.

All this marked Candiria as an act to watch in the late 90s, and they appeared to be living up to expectations when their accident occurred. While this has obviously set them back a year and a half, it has also meant they have reevaluated that which is most important to them – the music. By all accounts, What Doesn’t Kill You… (due in July) sees the band typically confounding expectations – some of the songs not even reliant on the technical style which earned them a formidable reputation. “Whether you are simple or technical with your music, it does not measure greatness,” reflects Schalk. “It’s the song.”