Artist: Suckers
Album: Candy Salad
Label: Frenchkiss
Rating: 7.5

There are a few interesting things that happen in a music listener’s life, and one of them is the moment when they discover a band, tell everyone about them, then watch them become huge. It’s the classic hipster cliché of knowing about a band before they get big, but what’s interesting is what happens to your enjoyment of said band after they get popular. Is there something that happens to the bands sound that all of a sudden make them more accessible? In some cases it does, while in others it’s just a case where the indie pop listener prefers their music not to be loved by the masses. So then what may happen then if this happens a few times, is the listener becomes privy to a certain sound, in hope that said band will not become big. Where that becomes tricky is in pop music, because inherently pop music is accessible, so what does the modern indie listener do when a young pop band on a small label comes along that has incredibly catchy sounds?

Brooklyn’s Suckers new album Candy Salad, is one of those albums that as soon as you hear it, you know that it has the possibility of becoming big. If these guys were Canadian, you would hear them across multiple stations because of their broad appeal, and because of CanCon rules you would hear them incessantly. Since they’re on a small label though, and with the decline of the influence of radio, it may be that Suckers will be able maintain that moderate appeal that the so called hipster indie listener craves. Candy Salad is chocked full of pop goodness from the driving crescendo of the opener “Nowhere”,
to the quick pop ditty “Figure it Out”, to the more progressive “Bricks to the Bones”.It’s clear that Quinn Walker is talented enough as a songwriter and a vocalist to give an album that is not only unabashedly poppy but has the variety to make you forget all the clichés. The thing about clichés in music is that they’re always regarded as the enemy, but they should really be looked at like the elite superstar you play against. You can’t stop them, you can’t only hope to contain them. (If only I could contain the clichés in this review.)

The album does have it’s moments when you realize that the clichés in the lyrics do get the better of Walker at times, but they’re done so earnestly especially in the epic ballad “Charmaine” that you don’t mind all the references to “giving all your love”, and the songs about unrequited crushes. With an album title like Candy Salad, you have to figure Suckers know what they’re doing when they serve you a plate of food that’s not really going to be good for you, but it sounds like it might.

-Michael Unger