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The Marble Index is a Hamilton, Ontario trio that sounds a lot bigger than the number of players it has. No matter: Watch Your Candles, Watch Your Knives, their sophomore effort, is an incredible varied and confident project that succeeds on several levels.

The chief factor of Watch Your Candles, Watch Your Knives that makes the disc such a success is the song composition. Each track is rich and varied not only from what come before or after but also internally. Same Schools, for example, begins sounding as if it could be an unreleased title from The Strokes, only to go veering in another direction or two before coming back. This doesn’t sound like they did it just for grins and giggles, either; the whole song fits together perfectly. There’s a unique balancing act that goes on throughout this track and throughout the entire project. Take Let Me Be The One. This could in lesser hands have been a white man’s beggin' song, yet here The Marble Index gives it a reggae backbeat which alternates with a mid-60’s British invasion harmony and a touch of what sounds like a cheesy organ, to boot. Then there’s the rollicking beginning to We Always Complain…this thing is just great from beginning to end. Brad Germain’s vocals are the unifying factor of the tracks on Watch Your Candles, Watch Your Knives, instantly familiar yet just distinctive enough to link each track with the next. Want To Change Your Life which takes Love Is The Drug by Roxy Music, turns it upside down and inserts a call and response into the middle of it.

Watch Your Candles, Watch Your Knives fulfills the promise made by the alternative rock genre so long ago and has since so rarely fulfilled. A killer, must have disc by a band whose best work, may, unbelievably, be still ahead of them. Highly recommended.