A Look Back: Orgy Candyass

A look back – Orgy Candyass

“Dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb”

Dizzy

“What's behind your painted face can you see the real pig in the mirror?”

Fiend

“If it stayed I'd never leave it. If that turned around I'd grieve the special dirty things that we used to talk about. I mean that loving you is strange and adored by me throughout.”

Stitches

Hmmmm I wonder if these lyrics are about women.  I think I heard somewhere that Jay Gordon, frontman for Orgy, is bisexual so in the interest of sexual as well as gender equality I guess it could be about a guy too.

Wow just look at these guys.  I'm gonna play cranky old man here but I really don't think five grown men should be wearing more makeup than the average corner prostitute.  Looking at this photo I can't help but think these guys were selling an image.

I stumbled across an old boombox and in it was a blank tape.  I played a minute of it just out of curiosity and then pushed the stopped button.  What came out was some awful sounding alt punk shit that I later found out from my brother was AFI(the tape used to belong to him).  When we were talking about it he said he made it sometime during high school and I told him, “Yeah man I don’t really dig the same shit I used to listen to in high school either.  I mean it’s not like I listen to Korn at all anymore.”  This discussion gave me an idea for a segment I could run on my blog where I look at all the stupid crap I used to listen to when I didn’t know any better because it was popular among teenagers that hated life and everything and yet despite their misanthropy and apathy felt alienated from the world even though that was the cause of it in the first place.  There’s stuff I used to listen to like Metallica that is ageless and I still listen to but there’s also a bunch of shit that I haven’t listened to since I graduated high school and with good reason.

                When I was in 9^th or 10^th grade Korn embarked on The Family Values Tour which showcased a lot of bands most of the Korn community either hadn’t heard of or didn’t get much airplay.  One of these bands was Orgy.  I had a lot of friends that went to this concert but seeing as I was underage and poor and my mother wouldn’t be caught dead at a Korn concert I was one of the few that didn’t show up wearing a Family Values Tour t-shirt the next day.  But my friends were going crazy over this band called Orgy that they saw there.  Later on the band’s singles were released as music videos on MTV and their popularity reached the mainstream’s and my attention.  Soon after they started getting radio play and you couldn’t escape that Blue Monday remix.  I didn’t even know it was a remix until I heard the original in the Wedding Singer.  By the time their second album was released interest in the band ceased.  Like before they released videos and singles to the radio but no one cared.  None of my friends who were self-professed Orgy fans a short 2 years early felt obligated to get the second album.  A lot of the popular music back then was rather disposable and we just moved on to the next big thing or whomever else toured with Korn.

                There’s a track on here called “All the Same” which is a pretty apt metaphor for this album.  Musically it is very different from most of the stuff at the time but lyrically it’s the same as everything else.  Let me ask you a question, what is more self-indulgent than an entire album devoted to bitching or whining about one relationship or another gone wrong?  Unfortunately this was a problem that reached across every musical genre at the time.  I think this was the very reason I started listening to alternative, hard rock, and heavy metal in the first place.  However well designed or intellectual your lyrics and no matter how well you sing them you still come off as a whiny cunt.  That’s why even though I think Adele’s got an amazing voice I can’t help but think she’s a one note artist because the content of all her songs seem to revolve around men that mistreated her.  The only time this does work is in blues but that’s because blues is a music defined by its own misery.

               

                Enough about the lyrical content how bout the music?  The music for the most part is good and also quite diverse.  The tempos rise and fall throughout the album creating different moods.  There are songs on this album that I can imagine a trendy yet tragically(and fashionably) depressed teenage outcast(Track 1 Social Enemies), some poor goofball trying to get into some dumbass’s pants at a dance club(Track 7 Blue Monday), and the goth crowd(Track 2 Stitches).

                I’ve been a little harsh about the lyrics or should I say theme of this album but after listening to it a few times ignoring the clichéd lyrics it’s very listenable.  I give Orgy’s Candyass a 78 C.  It’s not terrible but my interest in music, my personality, and maturity, has surpassed my need for this kind of music.  A large portion of this album is devoted to relationships and at the time I bought it I was barely interested in girls and had never been in a serious relationship.  The truth is even now I wish more bands were musically similar to Orgy on this album.

Blue Monday - This actually isn't a bad song and whatever I may say about this album I still love this cover.  That's not to say that I don't prefer New Order's version.

 This here is least visually appealing video I've ever seen.  The point of most music videos are the same as the singles released to radio stations.  It's to promote forthcoming albums or ones that have been recently released.  Music videos are designed to offer something artistic, sexy, or visually pleasing to those singles so you can reach wider audiences... or at least I think that's what they're for.  This one however just has the band playing in a motorized cube while the director looks at lyrics and points at stuff.  I can't believe he got paid to make this video.  I bet that asshole was laughing all the way to the bank.