The Candle Thieves - 'Sunshine and Other Misfortunes' (Carnival Town) Released 19/04/10

There is an established mathematical formula which demonstrates that the length of time it takes to start liking an album is directly proportional to its quality. In other words, those records that are immediately catchy are soonest thrown aside, while those that take longer to get into will eventually take pride of place in your collection.

The Candle Thieves have come shuffling out of the Midlands’ musical wasteland of Peterborough, bespectacled faces looking timidly groundwards, quietly determined to smash that formula to smithereens and take the pop and indie charts with it.

Give ‘Sunshine And Other Misfortunes’ an initial, absent-minded spin, and you might think your local record store had accidentally mislabelled the latest Scouting For Girls album, so unashamedly prominent are the pop credentials of opening track and debut single ‘We’re All Gonna Die (Have Fun)’.

But let the record play a little longer, and the idea that this is not your average throwaway pop record begins to seep into your consciousness; lyrics that might normally be associated with the likes of Conor Oberst or Elliott Smith; distorted instrumentation that would feel at home on an Eels album. By the time you reach the Strawberry Fields intro and circular dream sequence vocals of third track ‘My Love Will Clap Its Hand For You’, it’s clear that The Candle Thieves are standing on the outside of pop and sucking it into their own world, rather than the other way round.  

‘Sharks and Bears’ is the song that Badly Drawn Boy searched for during his happier moments, while ‘Bright Lights’ is the cream of Sufjan Stevens with all the electronic noises sieved out. There’s more mid-album pop chart potential in the shape of ‘Dreaming Of Lucy’ and especially ‘My Little Room’, but things get serious again as they head down the home straight.

The light, sugar-coated tones of ‘Not The Only One’ are the sweetener with which life-devastating lyrical bad news is broken, the marriage of sad lyrics with happy tunes fast becoming The Candle Thieves’ trademark, and the reason that ‘Sunshine And Other Misfortunes’ is such an appropriate album title.

Final confirmation that this band are serious about their originality and creativity, two attributes the current pop industry fears most, comes in the three part epic of album closer ‘Singapore’, a lushly arranged love song courageously wrapped in the sort of perpetually repeating musical patterns made famous by the likes of Explosions In The Sky and Icelandic post-rockers For A Minor Reflection.

You feel it would only need Radio 1 to get the briefest whiff of some of these songs in their nostrils for them to start plastering them all over the airwaves, an outcome no doubt The Candle Thieves’ record label wouldn’t mind too much. If that were to happen, for the rest of us looking on, it might feel as if the original music camp had finally got its Trojan horse through the gates.