Roman Candle

The Wee Hours Revue

(V2)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Roman Candle have been stuck in label limbo for a number of years, and a sympathetic new home, V2, has encouraged them to cleanse their palette and retouch their debut before moving forward.  The Wee Hours Revue grants the band a mulligan, and they put it to good use.  While previously declared an alt-country group, Roman Candle now sound like a band more interested in bringing you the sort of earnest and old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that quickly lodges in your head without ever overwhelming it.  The Wee Hours Revue brings you back to a time when people could smoke in bars, even though Roman Candle sound like a band that’s ready to leave the hazy, humble bars behind and start playing mid-afternoon sets at summer festivals.

The Wee Hours Revue is written with that scope, and frontman Skip Matheny is up to the challenge, singing with the panache of a twanged-up Mick Jagger.  There are also some echoes of Train’s Patrick Monahan, which isn’t quite the catastrophe that it may seem; Matheny is a much better lyricist and has the comfort of a much more interesting band.  They start out with a fire in their belly; opener “Something Left to Say” is a propulsive barroom rocker about homecoming (“It’s hard to fit a lot of years in a Friday night”).  Again, it’s a summertime record through and through; summer shows up to rattle the ceiling fans in the opener, and it makes another more obvious appearance in the heartsick “Another Summer,” a good-time rocker with some heavy undertones.

Occasionally Roman Candle forget to rely on anything other than a poppy hook (“You Don’t Belong To This World”), which results into some stumbles into adult contemporary cubicle-rock.  But then they also pull some risky change-ups that pay off, like the wistful electro-piano pop (and seasonal shift) of “Winterlight.”  Now that they’ve made peace with their past, hopefully they will feel free to continue this expansion.