I guess I was first attracted to this band by their wildly pedantic song titles. Happily, it isn’t the first time the back of a jewel case has overcome any calculated decision making procedures I might pathetically feign. I distinctly remember reaching for my wallet the first time I heard that The New Mexican’s Chicken Head Talking Diamonds had a song on it called "Lesbian Lammas Are the Fruit of Gnomes."

While not as likely to excite my lust for mythical lawn ornaments, the titles "The Basque Country" and "Works Cited" leave me hungry for music. They implore me to convince some reclusive Russian Lit. professor to play violin in our new folk-pop band.

Of course, if you hipsters, slowly growing tired of your glam-rock nostalgia, want charmingly pastoral cloudscapes of anachronistic melodies, Candy Bars can offer that too. However, what I love is their lyric’s disaffected bourgeois Eurocentrism; every song is a sacred medieval tapestry alternating with the nihilistic paint-smears of 21st Berlin.

I may be a snobby north-coaster but I need to say I’m impressed to the point of petty regionalism. Is this band really from Florida?

Yes. And I say Candy Bar’s sound is glamorous and discordant chamber noise. Vocalist Daniel Martinez’s conveys a mournful, raspy decadence throughout the record. Poised instrumentals are wispy as any other painted-dandy-of-a-pop-band but achieve a fuller, more powerful sound than most. In contrast to what the labels are pushing these days, Narravation is occasionally soupy and laborious as a Nick Cave tune, but always on message: memory, art, pain, love.

The whole work is ripe, not only with sardonic words of old and new worlds colliding, but with tight production values and musicianship. Hi-fidelity layers abound, but a total lack of contrived or imposing harmonies makes each song move as one melodic leviathan through Voltaire’s Paris, Eliot’s Wasteland, or your own transfigured living room.