AEM094 Magic Man

It’s one thing to cash in on “bor­rowed nos­tal­gia from the unre­mem­bered ‘80s,” as James Mur­phy put it. It’s quite another to dig deep into bor­rowed nos­tal­gia from the unex­pe­ri­enced 80s. The first is a kind of homage for an unre­peat­able bucolic past of Casios and bar­bi­tu­rates and roller skates. It’s pretty and a lit­tle bit sad, like find­ing a fuzzy pic­ture of some attrac­tive teenagers you don’t know hang­ing out on a beach in Cal­i­for­nia, or worse, Florida. But the sec­ond kind of nos­tal­gia is a bit weirder: unex­pe­ri­enced nos­tal­gia, after all, has bred things as diverse as Ren­fairs, Civil War reen­act­ments, and the Flint­stones. In other words, it’s more car­toon­ish than ele­giac, more fetishis­tic than sin­cere. This isn’t a bad exchange, nec­es­sar­ily, espe­cially if you’re the kind of per­son who prefers the idea of dat­ing Molly Ring­wald in high school to the real-life expe­ri­ence of dat­ing your actual high-school girl­friend. To bring things back to music, though, if the first kind of nos­tal­gia is a band like Delorean, then the sec­ond is Magic Man, a baller group of col­lege stu­dents born post-Reagan based out of New Haven and Boston and bound to blow up big in t-minus 5…4…3…2…

Check it out. The story behind Magic Man’s fan­tas­tic debut record Real Life Color (free down­load here: http://magicman.bandcamp.com) is so spot on that it reads like erotic fic­tion for PR firms. Writ­ten while the band was organic farm­ing in France, the group pro­ceeded to record the 10-song set on Garage­band in an alter­nat­ing series of dorm rooms pri­mar­ily through their Mac­books’ built-in micro­phones! Holy shit, call the laun­dry ser­vice. What’s shock­ing, though, is how great the whole pro­duc­tion sounds, crisp, warm, the synths blippy and blur­rpy and the vocals echo-y and full. Who­ever manned the boards for these mas­ter­ful not-so-lo-fi ses­sions deserves a Grammy. Fuck Steely Dan: this is stu­dio wizardry.

Even though it might be easy to deride Magic Man as just what the blo­gos­phere ordered, I would urge the skep­ti­cal lis­tener to sus­pend judg­ment a lit­tle bit longer. For all the links one could make between Real Life Color’s sonic palette and any num­ber of other Inter­net gen­er­a­tion phenoms—the pul­sat­ing melodic sen­si­bil­i­ties of more recent Ani­mal Col­lec­tive, the chirpy blip-tune of the Postal Ser­vice, the quasi-Afro vocal tics of Vam­pire Weekend—the songs them­selves are so immac­u­lately crafted that they could, for all intents and pur­poses, be per­formed on Alpine horn and mara­cas and still sound like a mil­lion lit­eral bucks. Blogs tend to latch on to gim­micky affec­ta­tions (for a par­tic­u­larly egre­gious exam­ple, note recent Frenchkiss band Free­lance Whales’ use of a water­ing can in their drum kit), in some extreme cases equat­ing a group’s genre or iden­tity with a sin­gle aes­thetic deci­sion: con­sider the fake genre of chill-wave, encom­pass­ing artists as diverse as Wavves and Neon Indian and pred­i­cated on noth­ing more than some vague com­bi­na­tion of tape-hiss, bit-crushed sine waves, and a melted-vinyl qual­ity to the mas­ter. What I’m say­ing is that our ears over the past cou­ple of years have been trained to lis­ten for acoustic minu­tiae rather than hooks or songcraft, the tech­ni­cal com­po­nents of tracks rather than the pla­tonic nature of the tracks them­selves. Get over it. If Magic Man were a guitar-drums-and-bass kind of deal, no one would be equat­ing them with the Arc­tic Mon­keys; by exten­sion, the band’s effort­less evo­ca­tion of the catch­words of late-00’s blog rock is too suc­cess­ful to be dis­missed auto­mat­i­cally as sim­ple aping.

So, the songs: Side-A “Daugh­ter” is a kind of sub­ur­ban world­beat anthem, all glitchy drum loops, some rol­lick­ing synth hooks, and a propul­sive energy that breathes life into the oth­er­wise syn­thetic sound­works. Then there’s the voice, which is hardly a voice, but more like the computer-generated com­pos­ite voice of the singers from mil­lions of other up-and-coming buzz bands. There’s not a lot of per­son­al­ity to it, but it’s unde­ni­ably effec­tive, sort of like the way mood sta­bi­liz­ers might make a fine sub­sti­tute for real emo­tions. The punch, though, lies in the instru­men­tals: there’s a tremen­dous flu­ency with the dynam­ics of synth-pop at work here, an avoid­ance of easy struc­tures and verse-chorus redun­dancy. Think Tears for Fears with a dig­i­tal twist and fewer melo­dra­matic ges­tures and you’re get­ting close.

B-side “Nest” is actu­ally my favorite of the two, a swirling bed­room tribal work­out that evokes the gauzy aura of a half-remembered child­hood hal­lu­ci­na­tion. This kind of decon­structed pop strikes me as dis­tinct from the overt song-ishness of “Daugh­ter”; it’s the sort of track you could get lost in for days, an infinitely-replayable 5:42 that never seems to age, like a great screen­saver you can lis­ten to.

Per­haps, then, that mer­cu­r­ial 80s vibe isn’t unre­mem­bered, or unex­pe­ri­enced, but uni­ver­sal, not a cos­mic music of the spheres, but a more per­sonal music of the synths. What else can I say? It’s magic, man.

Ben Las­man

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