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HOT OFF THE PRESS – Here We Go Magic
It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for Nick Courtright’s weekly first glance at just-discovered music, whether it be just-released, just-leaked, or some long-lost gem that has remained under the radar. Click here for other recent editions of Hot Off the Press, featuring acts such as Animal Collective, Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, M. Ward, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Crystal Stilts, White Denim, and Grizzly Bear.
released February 24 on Western Vinyl
Report Card: B+
Waterlogged and almost exhausted, Here We Go Magic’s self-titled debut throws a few excellent songs out there in an effort to survive its cumbersome name and thin catalog. At turns eerie and buoyant, the album is wispily folky while incorporating electronic flourishes and tunefulness in a way that feels both comforting and excellent. But while often catchy and joyfully monotonous—several songs are constructed from one highly repetitious base with change made on top, especially in the way of main man Luke Temple’s falsetto-heavy singing—it’s hard to shake the feeling that this album was considered “finished” just a tiny bit too early.
The album starts off with a couple stunners: “Pieces of You” builds a meditative dirge, a la early Akron/Family, from a nicely woven tapestry of repetitive percussion, and truly, while the entire song is almost absent of variation off its initial theme, it probably could have gone on for a couple more minutes without much complaint. “Fangela,” on the other hand, uses a more standard song structure and is almost strikingly poppy, while still confounding the listener a bit with interpretive possibility, and it’s these two tone-setting tracks plus first single “Tunnelvision” (which may or may not be the album’s best track), that make it seem like Here We Go Magic is destined to take people’s minds off Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective for one godforsaken minute.
Unfortunately, beyond that there’s not much to work with. The one big thing plaguing this debut is that after the first four tracks, the album gets pretty light in the way of excitement. Of Here We Go Magic’s nine songs, three are ambient throwaways—to have a couple patchwork tracks in place can provide a nice segue between hits, but to have two in a row, as happens near the end of the album, makes it seem like Temple just wanted to get this music off his chest. And the rushed feel of this release is exacerbated by the final track, “Everything’s Big,” which, while a decent little song, sounds like it could have been written by a different band altogether. Admissible is that these issues are “whole album” complaints, because the big picture is that Here We Go Magic has significant promise—at the end of the day, the three or four most finished tracks here are in line with much of the best music released this year, and that’s not too bad.
Listen to music by Here We Go Magic here
Video for “Tunnelvision”