Candelabro vs Western Elitism

by Jenny Sequoia, Contributor

In a year full of high-profile releases, a relatively unknown Chilean band, Candelabro, quietly dropped their bombastic second album, Deseo, Carne y Voluntad. It’s a wonderful album, full of creative genre blending, powerful instrumentals, and some beautifully crafted emotional moments. It’s a listen that is equal parts surprising and dense, and is certainly in the upper echelon of releases within 2025. Despite all this, if you look around online for discussions of this album, there's a shocking and unnervingly frequent comment that appears amidst any veneration or praise; people will not stop saying that Candelabro sounds like Black Country, New Road. 

You don’t need to be a genius to see how ridiculous this assertion is. Not only is it inaccurate, but I struggle to find any real basis for the claim at all beyond the presence of a saxophone and drop guitar tunings. Candelabro’s genre mixes are more reminiscent of jazz fusion than Black Country, New Road’s brand of post rock, and Deseo, Carne y Voluntad is more concerned with maintaining one’s religious faith than For The First Time’s exploration of growing pains, Ants From Up There’s fixation on nostalgic longing, or Forever Howlong’s thesis on individual agency. All the similarities lie within instrumentation; the bands’ sounds are quite distinct from each other.

It’s becoming more and more common to see these sorts of connections within Western music discussion. So many supposedly credible music sites end up explaining non-Western genres within Western pedagogical understanding. Within modern discussions of Indonesian Gamelan, there’s a large group of people who explain the intense rhythmic passages within the terms of Metal. People I’ve spoken to about Tibetan Folk music have attempted to explain its sound with 18th century German music theory terms. I’ve even seen transcriptions of North American Indigenous music that attempt to notate each pitch with exact microtonality. This practice is not only a truly hapless endeavor, it devalues the art being discussed through blatant cultural mischaracterization that often loops back around to being appropriation. In music circles full of people who boast about their diverse listening, there is an epidemic of cultural vampirism.

Even more silly is how simple it is to tear Eurocentric logic down. The traditional rock music formula has been all but completely overthrown for decades now, arguably since the late ‘80s. If we are to believe that modern post rock with any extended amount of instrumentation can be boiled down to ripping off the Windmill Scene, then are we not also to believe that any 2000s post hardcore or post rock is just ripping off Slint and Talk Talk? Is all psychedelic rock just various interpretations of Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles? Is the extended recorded history of music simply a continuation of what has been done and nothing more? 

Obviously not! Music is an art form. Art forms continually innovate and build upon themselves, and, by extension, are more than a sum of their parts. Candelabro are no different.

Deseo, Carne y Voluntad has so much more to give than its relationship to what came before. There is a note for note Slint quote in the track “Liebre”, but it’s developed in a much more resolutely triumphant way than on the original track “Don, Aman”. Chalking Candelabro’s sound up to an interpretation of Black Country, New Road ignores the fiery flamenco sounds and dissonant harmonic stabs that give it such a powerful sense of friction. 

This sort of devaluation has a continuous effect. Describing Gamelan patterns as “grindcore” removes the music from its powerful cultural implications on the islands it originates from. Explaining Tibetan Folk songs as being in 6/8 or a swung 4/4 ignores the unique emotion the rhythms evoke. Microtonally dictating the exact frequency of each pitch fails to see the raw power behind Indigenous voices shouting in unison.

Maybe these takes more often come out of a place of ignorance than malice. Maybe these ideas are coming from amateurs who are just throwing their hat in the ring. Regardless of intention, these takes have a tangible negative impact. By treating non-Western music as a structure rather than a gestalt, audiences play into a disgusting tradition of Western elitism within musical practices. There is a direct link between Heinrich Schenker’s deeply racist and antisemitic music theory and the unchallenged Western ears of thousands of Rate Your Music users. We are quite literally assimilating non-Western culture through our sheer audacious ignorance. 

The worst part about this topic is that it's comically easy to not fall victim to these ignorant readings of music. It requires the slightest hint of background research, a tiny dash of humility, and the faintest respect for culture that is not your own. We owe so much more to the cultures we have assimilated than an ignorant review and a 7/10.