Pete Galub’s album Candy Tears came to my attention because he occasionally plays guitar in Brooklyn’s own The Universal Thump (who I mentioned in SMS #40, and elsewhere). In that context, he’s a mild-mannered and no-note-out-of-place sideman, but that reputation belies the unbuttoned excellence and intensity of Candy Tears, which has a punky mid-eighties vibe of the sort that Ted Leo is always trying to get at. Galub is a remarkable guitar player, a slightly reckless monster of the strings who aspires on that instrument to the madness of a Robert Quine or Richard Lloyd. The compositions on Candy Tears, meanwhile, are dire, hopeless romances by and large, and as a singer, Galub has something in common with New York voices like Johnny Thunders or Richard Hell—all over the place, but in a highly expressive way.
Where his technique as a singer is not notable for its conservatory qualities, he complements the lack of varnish with intensity and tragicomedy. He likes to burst unexpectedly into falsetto, or to go for the top of his range. Despite the riskiness of the approach, there’s not one song on Candy Tears that doesn’t have a sinister inventiveness and a great deal of charm. A lot of people in my part of Brooklyn like Pete’s songs, and you can see why. He is sort of an amalgam of things that are important to the last thirty years of rock and roll. You can hear Television in him, and The Replacements, and The Feelies, and The Clean, and The Individuals, and Freedy Johnston, and Pavement, and the dBs, etc. But his playing is so great and his songs so impassioned, that he transcends the density of influence and becomes totally his own. There’s something to be amazed about on every track on Candy Tears, and if he has not yet given you a reason never to look away quite yet, if he has not yet made his Blood on the Tracks, there is every reason to suppose that he could do so and soon will.
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