I like how weird Candy are. The American noise rockers don't really play American noise rock, but let's start there: this album—their third, and second for Relapse—has the cold, big-city simple pummel of noise rock but also definitely plays nice with The Locust's freaky grindpunk, but then songs like “You Will Never Get Me” play a sort of stoopid groovy hardcore, with machinistic stomp battling noise soundscapes (elsewhere, “Silent Collapse” displays a slightly smarter groovy hardcore). 

Previously the band has toyed with both d-beats and industrial sounds, and while that is half great/half unfortunate, the industrial is almost more in feel and tone than in any musical reference point (although “Dehumanize Me” gets close to cheeseball industrial and “Dancing To The Infinite Beat” is nothing I need to listen to ever again). Here, these mainly short and quirky bursts of cathartic I-guess-let's-say-hardcore fit more in line with stuff on the great Three One G catalogue: Dead Cross and Deaf Club would be great labelmates for Candy (proven especially on album highlight “Terror Management”). But Relapse ain't a bad place to be, at all, for forward-thinking noise of this calibre, songs like the title track approximating a bad-dream headache more than anything else. 

Or maybe it's Faith No More at their weirdest and most abrasive, songs sped up to double time, those ruthless grooves the only thing providing breathing room in all the violence (well, there's “Love Like Snow”'s atmospheric melodies, which rule). I like how weird Candy are, although the weirder they get, the less it's clear on if I actually enjoy listening to them or not (hello, “Hypercore”): this stuff is a chore, and the band sound like they kinda hate me as the listener. Which I also kinda like.