In 2007 Suckers released one of the best tunes of the year, "It Gets Your Body Movin'", an epic anthem rivaling Arcade Fire's Wake Up in all it's magnitude. Even if it sounded better than most released indie-pop recordings today, it was supposedly only a demo.
In 2007 Suckers had an EP amount of edgy, quirky and innovative supposedly-demo-tunes streaming on their MySpace page that were never released officially but were amongst others like Dirty Projectors and Yeasayer and MGMT to define the distinctively tropical, melodic and progressive Brooklyn-sound of the time, but their first official release followed only two years later in 2009 and featured some new songs instead of the already released "demos". What was still included, was "It Gets Your Body Movin'".
In 2010 the group finally released their debut full-length "Wild Smile" that took a clear turn to another direction and felt like the group was purposefully, almost too intentionally wanting to separate themselves out of the whole Brooklyn-pack with more edge than the others.
The turn to freaky 80s hard rock influenced, deliberately cheap sounds and way over the top mood alienated some fans and then again made some new ones. The album included also the third version of It Gets Your Body Movin' which was still clearly the highlight. I was still among the ones that "Wild Smile" turned off and it left me thinking whether the tale for Suckers would be at it's end for me personally.
What came in as a great surprise then was that Sucker's brand new album "Candy Salad" is a clear step back to the warm, diversely tropical sound with anthemic but (t)wistful tunes what the band was originally made of.
Going Nowhere starts the album with a nice punch, twists and anthemic qualities without going way over the top keeping the package still stylistic making it clear we're on a good step back to the golden age of the Brooklyn-sound and delicious melodic pop-crafting.
Figure It Out continues with minimizing everything but the important and packs less than 2 and half minutes of pure awe-inspiringly repeatable catchiness. Bricks to the Bones slows the album down to the chilled out mixture of the huge, instantly hitting bitter-sweet choruses and countless tropically zealous melody passages and hooks the album is mostly made of and George along with Turn On the Sunshine work well to lift the mood to a nice tropical dream.
All in all, "Candy Salad" is Sucker's most refined collection to date and raises the group back on the class A of finely crafted palm-obsessed freak-pop.
Listen to the album entirely below and watch the music videos for Easy Chairs from the first EP and It Gets Your Body Movin' from Wild Smile.
SUCKERS - EASY CHAIRS
SUCKERS - IT GETS YOUR BODY MOVIN'