Introduction

NEW ROMAN TIMES (2004)
1) Prelude; 2) Sons Of The New Golden West; 3) 51-7; 4) White Fluffy Clouds; 5) That Gum You Like Is Back In Style; 6) Might Makes Right; 7) Militia Song; 8) R'n'R Uzbekistan; 9) Sons Of The New Golden West (reprise); 10) New Roman Times; 11) The Poppies Of Balmorhea; 12) The Long Plastic Hallway; 13) I Am Talking To This Flower; 14) Come Out; 15) Los Tigres Traficantes; 16) I Hate This Part Of Texas; 17) Hippy Chix; 18) Civil Disobedience; 19) Discotheque CVB; 20) Hey Brother.
Camper Van Beethoven's «proper» comeback album must have been one of the most interesting albums of 2004 — although, apart from a few politely positive reviews in major outlets, not a lot of people ended up noticing it: the price you pay after spending your most creative and produc­tive decade as an underground semi-joke act and then disappear off the radars and stay off them while the musical world around you dies, resurrects, and forgets that you ever existed in the first place. But for those few true heroes still willing to listen, Lowery and Co. scramble together a project that has got to count as their most serious undertaking ever.
See for yourself: New Roman Times, referring not so much to the serif typeface that I am using to write this review as to the idea that with the election of George W. Bush, humanity may have regressed two thousand years back in its evolution (hey, not my idea — address all your indigna­tion to David Charles Lowery, San Antonio, Texas!), is a concept album... nay, actually, is a full-fledged rock opera that tells you the story of a disintegrated United States of America, in which the protagonist finds himself fluctuating between the gung-ho Republic of Texas and the free-thinking, but predictably decadent and wobbly Republic of California — now serving as a fervent volunteer in the Texas army, now seduced by the easy-livin', drug-heavy lifestyle of the West Coast, and finally going nuts over the whole thing and becoming a religious fundamentalist (the last song is allegedly about his self-indoctrination for suicide bombing). Rich enough for you?
And if the storyline itself does not suffice, then how about the music — eclectically drawing upon all the different strands of CvB's past, from country to ska to punk to pop, and throwing in some additional inspirations as well, such as progressive rock and heavy metal that they had largely shunned before 2004? The album is fairly long, but not at the expense of constantly recycling the same ideas — no two tracks, except for occasional reprises of themes, really sound alike, and most reflect a good deal of thought process and studio work invested in them. Of course, CvB were never a «lazy» band, but everything they did so far since their reunion had a certain throw­away flavor to it; well, no more — you can listen to New Roman Times six or seven times in a row and still have certain things left undiscovered about it.
Diverse, intelligent, unpredictable, humorous, well-produced, so what is there not to like? Well, as far as I am concerned — that seems to be just the problem. Camper Van Beethoven were many things in their lives, but they were never Pink Floyd, and this record is just too Floyd-ian for them, or, if you want a comparison that would be a tiny bit more accurate from a musical point of view as well, too Rush-like. In theory, these songs are well-written and professionally executed, but they aren't fun. It's as if the boys are so deeply driven by the concept that they take things far more seriously than they should, and this reflects badly on the music, because the band members are neither instrumental virtuosos nor melodic geniuses, and the best CvB material had always relied on nonchalance, nihilism, humor, and hooks to get by. New Roman Times, in comparison to that, tends to drag and sag far more often than could be deemed acceptable.
Things go bad already on the first track, ʽSons Of The New Golden Westʼ, which sounds like a cross between Larks/Red-era King Crimson (same tricky time signatures, guitar-violin interplay, general doomy heaviness, etc.) and modern brands of art-metal (especially in terms of guitar solo work). I mean, it's not bad, but... do we really need that? It sounds like a tightly focused, serious­ly disciplined, almost math-rock-compatible piece of work, but focus and discipline at the ex­pense of fun was never an ideological concern for CvB, so why start now? And there's much more of the same ilk, even when the vocals arrive — ʽWhite Fluffy Cloudsʼ, for instance, is a full-fledged prog-metal workout, again, not a bad one, but these guys are too professorial to de­liver a proper ass-kicking attitude.
They can still do some interesting things, even by reviving disco (ʽDiscotheque CVBʼ) and crossing it with drum machines and lyrical lead guitar, but they all sound more interesting on paper than in reality. Meanwhile, their classic ska schtick, as they rewind it on ʽMight Makes Rightʼ and the near-instrumental ʽLos Tigres Traficantesʼ, is reduced to the role of an old friend that still pops in for a drink or two, but has nothing new to tell you anyway.
In the end, the only song that properly «gets» me is the album-closing ʽHey Brotherʼ. Beginning with a "hey..." that you half-expect to be followed by "...Jude", it quickly becomes a moving soul number, only for you to discover, horrifyingly, within half a minute that it is the anthem of a suicidal terrorist — making this the only example I know of a tune where the "soul brotherhood" idea is cruelly turned on its head; but then again, why not? They make a great point here, namely, that deeply felt religious fervor that fuels so many great soul and gospel tunes can just as easily be associated with violence and the destructive side of religion, rather than the peace-and-love aspect. I have no idea if they ever do the song live — it is very inviting to sing along, but you'd be basically singing along to a declaration of faith by a 9/11 plane hijacker. Had something like this been released by a major band, there'd probably be a huge PC scandal all over the world — but I guess there are certain advantages to holding on to your underground status for decades.
That said, the audacity of ʽHey Brotherʼ does not redeem the album as a whole. It is just too heavy, and I don't mean the musical sound — I mean, it sounds as if it all came from the brain of a mathematics / social science professor (I guess Lowery is one, in a sense, given his math cre­den­tials), and everything is too detached and clinical for my tastes. I give it a thumbs up without hesitation — the concept is interesting and somewhat original, and there's so much stuff here that I will probably want to revisit the record again, and, most importantly, this is one of those come­back efforts where the artist is dead set on pushing boundaries rather than settle into a comfor­table rocking chair. But ultimately, it's like an anti-utopian novel set to music where the message and the symbolism are more important than raw feeling — and so, a modern day Quadrophenia this daring rock opera is not. Good smack in the mouth of the American society circa 2004, though, and every bit as relevant in 2017.
LA COSTA PERDIDA (2013)
1) Come Down The Coast; 2) Too High For The Love-In; 3) You Got To Roll; 4) Someday Our Love Will Sell Us Out; 5) Peaches In The Summertime; 6) Northern California Girls; 7) Summer Days; 8) La Costa Perdida; 9) Aged In Wood; 10) A Love For All Time.
If you like your Camper Van Beethoven slow, serious, nostalgic, melancholic, and soulful, this one's for you. Now that the band members are in their fifties, chances of them reigniting the old hooligan spirit are fairly low — but it is almost as if they are consciously accelerating the matura­tion-aging process. Like New Roman Times, La Costa Perdida is another conceptual suite, but this time, it has nothing whatsoever to do with politics: most of the record reads like a symbolic love letter to their native California, soaked in nostalgia for the old days — you know, when la costa was not yet quite perdida, so to speak. The band members themselves stated that their chief influence for the record was Holland by The Beach Boys, an album whose serene, naturalistic spirit does have something in common with what they are trying to do here. Whether they suc­ceed in this is a different matter: most of the critics who still remembered CvB from the old days resorted to comparisons with Key Lime Pie, the most serious, thoughtful, and potentially boring release that they had in those old days. And these comparisons weren't always friendly.
To be perfectly honest, I like the idea and respect the attempt, but the album does bore me. It is really slow-moving (except for ʽPeaches In The Summertimeʼ, played at such a ridiculously frantic tempo that it sounds like they are seriously trying to compensate with just this one track for all the slowness around), really monotonous (introspective, brooding nostalgia permeates all the vocal and instrumental parts), and not too big on catchy hooks. Throw in the fact that Lowery is quite far from the most hypnotic performer when it comes to wearing your intellectual heart on your college suit sleeve, and what you get is something that works much better in theory than on practice — much like Key Lime Pie.
It is easy to illustrate on the example of the very first track, the country-rock waltz ʽCome Down The Coastʼ. Lisher's lead lines are colorful and sweet, Lowery's sentimental lyrics are delivered sincerely and friendly, but nothing ever rises above «adequate» — and when they get to the repetitive "come down and see me sometime" chorus, it quickly becomes too predictable and boring: how many times can you chant "[Insert four-syllable-long girl name here], come down and see me sometime" before you begin to sound like an obsessed whiner? And, needless to say, the backing harmonies are quite a far cry from the Beach Boys. Word-wise, Lowery may be getting his point across (all things may come and go, but girls and the sea shore will be here for ever), but atmosphere-wise, the song does not make much of an impression.
The same judgement, I guess, gets extrapolated over everything else here. ʽToo High For The Love-Inʼ does have a lovely set of female vocals reminiscent of certain strands of lush Europop from the Sixties, and a few pretty guitar flourishes to boot, but still overstays its welcome. The psycho-blues anthem ʽSomeday Our Love Will Sell Us Outʼ rides the same stiff groove for five minutes, briefly plunging it into pools of chaos during the coda, but its potentially mesmerizing mix of slide guitars, violins, and sitars is really so simplistic and repetitive that no true magic comes out of it. And the album's alleged centerpiece, ʽNorthern California Girlsʼ, takes on ʽHey Judeʼ-ian proportions, slipping into an anthemic coda whose two most notable features are: a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part, sounding exactly like a million distorted psychedelic solos before it, and a choral chant of "Northern Califor-nia girls, Northern Califor-nia girls" by a pack of hypnotized zombies who have long ago forgotten the meaning of that noun phrase but have been cursed to go on chanting it forever because they do not deserve any better. At least, you know, the da-da-da part on ʽHey Judeʼ was delivered with some genuine excitement.
In short, I am touched by Lowery and Co.'s feelings for their homeland, and I'm pretty sure the record will have a special appeal for all those who also happened to grow up between Stinson Beach and Arcata in the Sixties and Seventies (and maybe even later), seagulls included. But in terms of a more universal appeal, this is no Holland, and there's way too much subordination of the music to the concept. "We're old tigers / Sleeping in the sun / Dreaming of the hunt", Lowery sings on ʽSummer Daysʼ, and I guess this is really what the whole thing is about. Except that some old tigers still manage to have more vivid dreams than others, and this particular batch of old tigers sounds like it at least needs a bit more vitamins to hold your attention.
EL CAMINO REAL (2014)
1) The Ultimate Solution; 2) It Was Like That When We Got Here; 3) Classy Dames And Able Gents; 4) Camp Pendleton; 5) Dockweiler Beach; 6) Sugartown; 7) I Live In L. A.; 8) Out Like A Lion; 9) Goldbase; 10) Darken Your Door; 11) Grasshopper.
Announced as a quick thematic follow-up to La Costa Perdida, this time focused on Southern rather than Northern California, El Camino Real is in some superficial ways similar to its pre­decessor — the basic theme, the Spanish title, the cover art — but in other ways quite different: shorter, tighter, faster, poppier, sprightlier, and, on the whole, far more efficient. Apparently, churning out rootsy pop hooks is much easier for the band at this time than weaving atmospheric soundscapes of longing and yearning. Or maybe it's just that Southern California happens to ignite and inspire them far more than Northern California, for whatever reason.
In any case, El Camino Real is simply a very good pop album — perhaps the most straightfor­ward pop album they ever made, with almost every song featuring an assortment of vocal and / or instrumental hooks that matter much, much more than the words, whether those words be nos­talgic, traditional, satirical, or surrealist. Even a few songs done strictly in the generic country-western style, like ʽDarken Your Doorʼ, are funny, upbeat, and catchy; and on the whole, there's plenty of diversity, with some tracks having a punky edge, some having a blues-rock one, and some just giving you a tasty slice of the good old power-pop — like ʽCamp Pendletonʼ with a chorus line that was born to be whistled over and over, even as the song hits you with an odd case of «dark-cheerful ironic nostalgia», or the album-opening ʽUltimate Solutionʼ, shifting between muscular, stomping garage-rock riffs and lighter, violin-driven verses.
If there's a problem here, it is precisely inverse to the problem of La Costa Perdida — this time, the songs are so much pop fun, you never really get to feel any concept behind them. Perhaps the natives of South California will inadvertently have their ears glued to the lyrics, but anybody else will simply have to enjoy the music. Here's ʽDockweiler Beachʼ, kinda sounding like what would have happened if The Smiths decided to sound like The Ramones, and throw in a bit of a musical reference to the Batman theme along the way. There's ʽI Live In L. A.ʼ, kinda sounding like what would have happened if The Pogues decided to sound like The Eagles, and throw in a bit of Dylanesque harmonica to boot. There's ʽIt Was Like That When We Got Hereʼ, one minute put­ting its trust into an anthemic chorus and the next minute staking it all on a nagging blues-rock riff in the old Alvin Lee tradition. It's fun!
By the time they reach the slow, languid, folksy coda of ʽGrasshopperʼ, you might realize that each and every song has something to offer — yes, the hard-rocking songs are too deeply steeped in irony to truly kick ass, and the soft songs aren't distinctive or soulful enough to guarantee an unforgettable experience, but there's an intelligent and/or a kind-hearted sentiment in each track, a hook or two in almost each track, and, of course, the usual CvB attention to colorful detalization. I'm not sure I could or even would like to spend a lot of time describing these details, so just take my word for it: this is a really, really fun record, with a classy attitude behind it. This time, these guys aren't even trying to make something unpredictable: they just went ahead and wrote and recorded some good music for you, instead of, say, doing some ska covers of Frank Sinatra or trying to record a death metal album with nothing but cellos and violins. Bottomline: if it's any indication, I'm definitely choosing Southern over Northern California. Thumbs up.

CANDLEMASS

EPICUS DOOMICUS METALLICUS (1986)
1) Solitude; 2) Demon's Gate; 3) Crystal Ball; 4) Black Stone Wielder; 5) Under The Oak; 6) A Sorcerer's Pledge.
I confess that I have never read any interviews with Leif Edling or any other members of Candle­mass, let alone any official or unofficial biography of the band — and therefore, I have no idea of how deeply serious they are themselves about their music. But whatever they have to say about it, it would be very hard for me to accept that anybody who names their first album Epicus Doo­micus Metallicus could do it without a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Really, this is within the same sphere as «Biggus Dickus» or something like that. And it makes me happy, too, because a solid healthy tongue-in-cheek attitude is the only thing that can save Candlemass from a massive face­palm, all of their historical importance notwithstanding.
Apparently, the entire genre of «doom metal» owes its formalization to the title of Candlemass' debut — and when it appeared, it did sound significantly different from earlier purveyors of the style, such as Saint Vitus and Pentagram. They were one of the first Scandinavian (in this case, Swedish) bands to open up the floodgates for Valhalla-Ragnarök-inspired heavy music, and, like every pioneering outfit, might sound a little crude, unpolished, and naïve in comparison with their followers — much like Black Sabbath, their chief source of inspiration, might also seem in com­parison with the general heavy metal scene that followed. But they have their advantages, too, a chief one being driven by the excitement that accompanies trying out a new formula.
A formula it is, of course, as bassist Leif Edling (who writes most of the music) and his pals capitalize on but one aspect of Sabbath — the slow, solemn, earth-shattering brutality of impen­ding doom — and expand it to forty-three minutes of dungeon-crawling music for your paganistic pleasure. Since the songs are slow, they are also long (just six tracks in all), and mood-wise, their goal is always exactly the same, making it understandably hard to come up with separate judge­ments for individual tracks. Differences include the presence/absence of acoustic intros and inter­ludes; the presence/absence of slightly sped up parts; increased/understated presence of lead guitar; increased/diminished function of the synthesizer (yes, a few tracks are marred by Queens­rychian keyboards, but, thankfully, not all of them, and I do believe that the credits do not even include a special listing for keyboards).
Typically, the weakest link in Candlemass is the vocalist: in their minds, the style calls for a pompous screamer rather than a vulnerable-street-guy like Ozzy, but they couldn't lay their hands on anybody of at least Ronnie James Dio caliber, either, so they had to settle for a Tony Martin look-alike instead and go along with Johan Längqvist, a large-piped loudmouth who is trying to deliver the apocalyptic / medievalistic lyrics with as much pathos as his pipes allow him, but also happens to be endowed with below-zero charisma and personality. Unfortunately, there's a lot of the lyrics on the album: were they to simply confine him to singing one opening and one closing verse and then devote the rest of the time to instrumental magic-making, things would get more tolerable and interesting — as it is, he happens to be all over the place, and it's bad.
What is good, then? The riffs. Edling's melodic skills are not directly comparable to Iommi in his prime — there is not a single passage here that would come close to the immediate visionary brilliance of an ʽElectric Funeralʼ or an ʽInto The Voidʼ — but he is still close to a perfect adept of the Iommi textbook, and rhythm guitarist Mats Björkman is able to reproduce that metal-melting, Hell-raising tone that, for some reason, had all but vanished off the Earth's surface after Sabbath's peak years. Meanwhile, lead guitarist Klas Bergwall, although kept amazingly quiet most of the time, occasionally erupts with new-generation metal solos that try to combine old school fluency and melodicity with a more technical, post-Van Halen attitude. The result is an interesting update on the Sabbath sound that is nowhere near as memorable as the original, but does not sound like mere slavish imitation, either.
If only one song needed to be singled out of the overall sludgy mass, I'd probably go for ʽUnder The Oakʼ, which is melodically as close to (slow) thrash metal as they ever get here and, because of that, gets an extra aggressive angle — most of these tunes just growl and grumble under your feet, but the opening riff of ʽUnder The Oakʼ actually snaps at your feet. If it weren't for the ne­ces­sity to somehow erase the vocal track from the corresponding channel in your brain ("MY HEART! BLEEDING FOR MY RACE!" — don't worry, they actually mean ʽmankindʼ under ʽraceʼ here, there are no traces of Aryan supremacy or anything like that, but it still sounds very, very ridiculous), this would be close to the perfect Candlemass song... unfortunately, since most of the vocals on Candlemass songs are dorky, there is no such thing as a perfect Candlemass song. As for the Iommi-style riffs, the best ones are probably on ʽSolitudeʼ (which is not a cover of the Sabbath tune, but the fact that they have a song by that name is probably not a coincidence) and ʽDemon's Gateʼ, but really, most of these slow sludgy monsters are interchangeable.
For all its alleged importance, still, Epicus is hardly the best possible Candlemass album. For one thing, even if the formula is established here 100%, it suffers from mediocre production values: the drums sound too tinny, and the guitars sound oddly distant, as if they had microphone prob­lems — worse, in fact, than those fifteen-year old Sabbath albums on which they were modeling themselves. Strangely, it may have something to do with the shittiness of Stockholm's studios at the time: Bathory's debut, recorded two years prior to this, suffered from the same problem. Even­tually, they'd get it straight, but for now, Epicus Domicus is more like Crapicus Sonicus in certain respects. Oh, and I can't really remember a single song, either, but for that one, I was fully prepared. Just as I was for brilliant lines like "The dawn was to come with the sunrise" and "Cursed be the sun / The women will weep for his fun / In the name of his magic so strong". What I was not prepared for was how oddly «homebrewed», in a way, this whole thing sounds: a problem that would not be overcome for quite some time yet. Still, I guess that the combination of an overall cool sound and historical importance should account for a mild thumbs up, despite production issues, lyrics that make Geezer Butler sound like Keats in comparison, and a vocalist whom I would very gladly "let die in solitude" if he'd only let me. Why shouldn't he? Death is his sanctuary, he seeks it with pleasure, his lifeblood is exhausted anyway...
NIGHTFALL (1987)
1) Gothic Stone; 2) The Well Of Souls; 3) Codex Gigas; 4) At The Gallows End; 5) Samarithan; 6) March Funebre; 7) Dark Are The Veils Of Death; 8) Mourner's Lament; 9) Bewitched; 10) Black Candles.
Only their second album, and already they have a new record label (Axis Records), a new drum­mer (Jan Lindh), a new lead guitarist (Lars Johansson), and a new vocalist (Messiah Marcolin; and no, "Messiah" is not his real name, just a sacrilegious substitute for the much more difficult to pronounce Bror Jan Alfredo). And has this changed anything? Heck no! This is still Leif Ed­ling's band, and its primary purpose is still to craft an atmosphere of theatrical doom, because there's no better way to distract yourself from the mundane apocalypse of your own universe than to immerse yourself in a magical mystery apocalypse of a universe where old men in crypts of despair form circles of magic and prayers, where your life will be put to the test as you drink the chalice of divine ambrosia, where the Devil's fingers dance upon the strings like fire, where only the vultures will come to see you hang... well, you get the picture.
As far as the technical and personnel changes are concerned, I would not define these as drastic. The new vocalist is rather a change for the worse — Marcolin is a higher-pitched quasi-operatic screamer without the tiniest speck of grit to his voice; Längqvist was cheesy enough, but at least the man could shoot out a good growl or bark, whereas Marcolin seems dedicated to the idea that Candlemass are producing a doom metal version of Tristan, and that his task is to get into charac­ter. On the other hand, the new lead guitarist is a good acquisition: they are still quite parsimo­nious with their solos, but Johansson, coming from the Van Halen school of thought, has a good way of combining first-rate technique with melodicity, and on those rare occasions when he is given full rein, I like what he is doing (for instance, the solo on ʽDark Are The Veils Of Deathʼ). However, the production still largely sucks: the new drummer gets the same tinny tone as the old one, and the guitars still have a «lo-fi» feel to them that does not allow to fully appreciate the good old Crunch worked out by Björkman.
The riffs, as usual, alternate between leaden-slow doom and thunderous mid-tempo doom, of which I far prefer the latter (ʽDark Are The Veils Of Deathʼ, which sometimes develops into chuggin' thrash) and am somewhat indifferent towards the former (ʽWell Of Soulsʼ, ʽMourner's Lamentʼ, whatever). The overall number of tracks here is higher due to the presence of short instrumental interludes, sometimes decent (ʽCodex Gigasʼ, where they seem to try to recreate the atmosphere of a Gregorian chant with heavy metal guitars) and sometimes not (ʽMarch Funebreʼ: whoever said it was a good idea to make a doom metal arrangement of Chopin?), but the overall makeup of a Candlemass song remains the same — five to seven minutes of a leaden riff, a tale of medieval woe, a couple of short solos, and maybe a nice key change or two in the middle. And again, Eidling and Björkman demonstrate that they are no Tony Iommi when it comes to crafting a nicely thunderous doom metal riff — they have the tone right, they have learned their Devil's interval, but it does not work nearly as well. I believe one reason for this might be that they are too influenced by classical music: some of these melodies, if you mentally transpose them to orchestration, almost seem like Wagnerian leitmotifs, and it never does anybody any good to play Wagnerian leitmotifs with heavy metal guitars.
Still, once they get in a bit of speed and energy, the results are decent — ʽDark Are The Veils Of Deathʼ, for instance, is a really cool song as long as the wounded Tristan keeps his mouth shut (and he does not do it for too long), with a howling doom riff sliding into a funkier one and then into a chuggin' third (gotta love the mood shifts). And on the whole, I do appreciate the musician­ship — I just find it hard to get excited about it even on a cheap fantasy level. (Also, the lyrics are atrocious, but that kind of goes without saying; once again, I miss the deep poetic level of Geezer Butler).