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Diamonds in the rough
Whether they like it or not, the duo Glass Candy have a lot of fans.
“This is red, red, red, red,” chants the sprightly redhead Ida No, lead singer of Portland’s Glass Candy, on “Digital Versicolor.” The track then reels off each of the colors of the chakra spectrum, which blend together to become white light. When No delivered that opening lyric at the band’s recent Coachella performance, 50 three-foot-wide balloons, each a color of the rainbow, bounced above the 6,000-strong crowd.
“But they had these insane fans blowing on us, and the balloons kept coming back,” Johnny Jewel, 33, the band’s other member and its soft-spoken musical epicenter, says with a laugh. “It looked like those toy vacuum cleaners with all the balls bouncing around inside.”
Regardless of the inflatables’ cooperation, Glass Candy’s purposefully underpromoted Coachella performance was a success. Which is all the more notable given the group’s reluctance to participate in the first place. Fiercely protective of their sound and image, No and Jewel turned the festival down three times prior to this year. “We’re such a conceptual group that it’s important to know when things are appropriate,” Jewel says. “We don’t take the cake just because it’s on the table.”
Luckily for them, Jewel is a majority stakeholder in Glass Candy’s label, Italians Do It Better, giving him control over every aspect of the band, including keeping the press at bay. “One of the ways we counteracted the bourgeois angle of Coachella was that we didn’t do any interviews,” Jewel says. In his opinion, any press flurry means a greater chance the band will be misunderstood or seem like a spoon-fed corporate-hype machine. “I’d rather people not hear about us than have it come out sounding stupid,” he adds.
More than ten years ago, the two met at No’s favorite grocery store in Portland. While buying carrots for her rabbit, No tried asking Jewel on a date. Although their romantic endeavors were short-lived, they bonded over a shared love of artists such as Nico and Velvet Underground and grew together musically instead. “I’d always done noise stuff,” Jewel says, “so I didn’t know how to play pop music.” He continues, “Ida couldn’t sing that well, and she’s still a bizarre singer. She sings like Allen Vega or Iggy Pop, who ride the beat the same way an MC or blues singer would.”
No and Jewel went through many permutations before arriving at their current sound. Although uniquely their own, it channels the arpeggiated synths of Italo and the morose underbelly of disco: after the helicopter whirl of the nitrous hits wear off, when the syrupy coma of heroin sets in. Their closest musical contemporaries are Nordic cosmonauts Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, whose disco stylings have a more space-age sheen than Glass Candy’s raw, analog approach.
For Jewel, the band’s disco vibe took shape in 2003. Preparing for a regional tour, he hand-made 300 CDs featuring Glass Candy and labelmates Farrah, Chromatics and Mirage. Someone at Pitchfork got ahold of one and reviewed it; soon after, 10,000 people tried to order the limited-release CD from Italians Do It Better’s website. Jewel reacts with both shock and appreciation: “It’s weird. Now there are a million bands cropping up that sound just like that compilation. It’s like a whole genre coming out of one studio.” At least that studio is his.
Now Glass Candy’s fan base stretches from the throngs of adoring Coachella fans to the home offices of Gucci in Italy where, when you’re put on hold, Chromatics, of whom Jewel is also a member, keep you company. Jewel’s notorious musical vision even inspired many of last year’s fashion collections, with designers using noir disco chic as their inspiration. Karl Lagerfeld tapped Glass Candy for a live performance at a Chanel runway show.
All this attention from the press and fashion worlds begs the question: Is the band cool with this type of promotion? “I’m on the fence with the fashion world because I think consumer-based society is full of shit,” Jewel says. “But the designers respond to the cinematic elements in the music to do their art, and that’s where I make my peace with it.”
Glass Candy plays Out of Order at darkroom Thursday 7.
