On their third full-length album, Candy have made a name for themselves in the scene. And with the release of It’s Inside You it has propelled them to a whole new level of noisy creativity. Their mindset writing It’s Inside You boiled down to just a few ideas. Big, fun, and ridiculous – within the first three songs, they’ve nailed their goals.
Opening up the mind-boggling proceedings is ‘eXistenZ’. Landing just shy of a minute and thirty seconds it’s the introduction you need to Candy. Bold, brash, a frenzied mix of violent hardcore and digitized industrial confusion, you’re blasted in the face with the unrelenting nature that doesn’t give up across the next half hour.
Vocalist Zak Quiram spits venom across the entire album, and never more ferociously than on ‘Terror Management’. blurring the line between artistic performance and letting out built-up emotion. There are a few points on the album that are so left-field from what might be expected that make you just grin with utter disbelief and wonder how they got away with it. Case in point, the title track throws in some breakdance/core beats that resemble nu-metal styles from the late 90s or early 2000s.
There’s also a guest guitar solo spot from Trash Talk’s David Gagliardi thrown into the mix, further proving you don’t know what you’re going to get with It’s Inside You. That unpredictability is what makes this album work so well, even when it shouldn’t. In a counterpoint to that note, they do sometimes veer off their own path and sound a little more “typically” hardcore, but then as quick as it happens, they come back to their own and redeem themselves with sharp turns that keep you on the edge of your seat.
The production is a bit muddy, but it wouldn’t be the same if the raw drums of Steve DiGenio were clean and processed. Neither would the guitars of Michael Quick & Drew Stark. The crunchy guitar tone from Quick is only amplified by Starks’ bulging bass that makes It’s Inside You the face-churning output that’ll make Candy stand out from any other band you put them up against.