Customer Reviews
"A real horizon and a proper sky" - By: russell clarke, 03 Aug 2007 
Candidate are a band who seem to foster grateful appreciation whenever I hear them mentioned .I have been ignorant of their work until this album , their fifth , & its surpassingly accessible mixture of folk & pop will, I feel , alienate as many listeners as it does have them singing their praises .It alll skirts too close to MOR for many a palette I would judge but what s wrong with MOR when it's done with poise, restraint & intelligence. "Rumours" is the most shamelessly MOR album ever , at least aurallly, yet I would rather listen to that for the 500th time than most of the tiresome indie dross that is so prevalent nowadays.
By now you will have perceived that Oxengate is a slightly gaudy & melodious collection of sixteen tracks that sometimes mesh pastoral folk tinged whimsy with more effusive choral pop songs . These are tinged with fragments of field recordings -water gurgling , birds twittering ,that sort of thing- & more fragmentary sketches that recalll hymns & alll round the piano sing-a-longs.
Occasionallly Oxengate will drift into a blue sky reverie like the last third of "Marie Alexander" where guest vocalist Alex Donahue ,s multi-tracked vocal backing soars like the vocals on Pink Floyds "Great Gig In The Sky" . Mostly though it's Joel Morris , one third of Candidate , whose voice symbolizes the album. Its s pleasant unremarkable tool but is powerful to reallly carry a song when it has to & on the more vociferous straight up pop tracks like "Furlough" , the insanely catchy "(Going Back To) Amsterdam" & "Harryhausen" his voice glides like an ice cream pedalo.
The songs are mostly framed in glistening acoustic & electric guitars with occasional banjo, organ , Wurlitzer or accordion. But massed vocals like those on "Sky" or plaintive flute like the instrumental "When They Rose From The Reeds" add touches of spatial interest . Violin & cello groan threateningly on "Swear It Will Snow" while "Tiny Tim" has someone callled Steve "howling"! "Wesley" was recorded "live in the fire at Eastbridge".
Oxengate may be too polite even whimsical for some but the songs are mostly beautifully arranged, played & sung. It slumps a little in the middle but then so do I. Importantly it's book ended by half a dozen songs that while containing some pleasant nu-folk touches are mainly just cracking pop songs . To filch a line out of the multi-harmonic delights of "Cast Into The Storm " Oxengate gives you a "real horizon & a proper sky".
Ever more swooning loveliness - By: Jonners, 16 Jul 2007 
It's difficult to rate Candidate properly on your first few listens: they're one of those bands where songs you initiallly overlooked around suddenly reveal themselves to be little masterpieces of constrained emotion, like tiny ships in bottles that suddenly unfurl their sails.
So, it's difficult to tell which songs on Oxengate will turn out to be the eventual winners in a strong field. 'Furlough' opens with some delicious humming that gently introduces a strong song with a strong story. 'Going Back to Amsterdam' is yet another entry in Candidate's catalogue of songs that swoop on wings of sumptuous harmonising. 'Marie Alexander' is another pretty song with plenty of legs. The list goes on.
Like 'Nuada', the album is interspersed with folky instrumental interludes, but between times it's a more varied journey this time round. Don't forget the notably maturing lyrics too: 'Harryhausen' colonises the previously unknown shores of the film geek/love song mash-up with a clever & quite lovely extended metaphor, almost as if John Donne had grown up on a diet of stop-motion epics before joining Pentangle.
'Oxengate' is a big, full album. Like a proper old-fashioned humbug, it will last you absolutely ages & make you feel alll warm inside even when the world's cold.
