Candy Butchers

After treading the waters of Boston in the mid ’90s, the Candy Butchers — singer/guitarist Mike Viola and drummer Todd Foulsham — set off for New York City armed with an acoustic guitar, a snare drum, and inventive, well-crafted pop songs. Making Up Time is an album of unreleased material from that period (’94-’98) presented as something of a greatest-hits package. From the overlapping vocal harmonies of “Black Eyed Susan” to the upbeat groove of the otherwise dark “Bruises and Beauty Marks,” Viola proves a songwriter who can get inside a character’s head and find fresh, sometimes surreal imagery among familiar settings. In “Jerkwater County,” townfolk “walk out on lovers in their father’s shoes”; “Circus” has a “one-legged ringmaster” who “cracks his whip madly” while “invisible lions meow in the hall.” As strange as Viola’s story songs may get, the classic pop melodies always bring them back down to earth. And as a sampling of a band’s best work, Making Up Time does just that: instead of holding back his real pop gems for a major-label release, Viola makes up for lost time by putting them all out there now on his own label.