Album Review: Four Candles – Nettle Rash

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Four Candles

Nettle Rash - German Shepherd Records

Tomorrow, the 12th July, German Shepherd Records will release “Nettle Rash” the new album from Four Candles, the band’s third album finds them taking their heavyweight post punk and focusing it on the issues that need to addressed in 2019, from climate change and the badger cull in the UK to an exploration of the seamier side of sexual entanglements, as well as keeping their surrealistic tendencies intact. If you wanted a feel good summer punk album then this isn’t it, Four Candles have delivered a typically off kilter album that embraces the spirit of post punk without sounding like an anachronism from the late seventies,

There are no prizes for guessing what opening track Badgers is about, this is a slice of angular bass driven post punk that recalls the heyday of The Fall and Public Image Ltd, this is followed by Angels Not Angels that brings the guitar the the fore and maintains their idiosyncratic and experimental approach. Nettle Rash is an album that never settles into a rut, the experimental punk of Fly In My Soup runs headlong into the dark fairground melody of Animals Attack which in turn evolves into the dark soundscape of Copycats. Four Candles are not a band that take prisoners, the attack constantly shifts but the most scathing moments are reserved for the scared cows of British culture that are wilfully slaughtered, something that is encapsulated in the album’s highlight ‘BBC‘ and the melodic closing track ‘They Don’t Care‘.

Nettle Rash also features the addition of guest vocalists from Matthew Hopkins and keyboards courtesy of sound engineer and Bobbie Peru frontman Simon “Ding” Archer, something that adds extra layers to their dense post punk racket. Four Candles have one foot firmly rooted in post punk’s glory days, but like all of the best bands that emerged from that scene’s origins they have constantly evolved and incorporated different elements and styles, Four Candles have mutated and Survived and moved way beyond their origins, the result is that Nettle Rash is simultaneously a classic post punk album from the Manchester underground and an experimental almost surreal urban soundscape.

Nettle Rash will be available from July 12th via the German Shepherd Records Bandcamp

Four Candles website is here and they can be found on Facebook here