Magic Music - Self titled
Magic Music’s original run ended in 1976 before the
band even recorded an album. Nearly forty years would pass before the
opportunity to do would present itself again to these Colorado based musicians.
By that point, the musical world had changed multiple times over and the style
that had fallen out of favor by the time of their mid seventies breakup now
occupies a comfortable and secure niche in the American songscape. Their debut
album Magic Music is a seventeen song release that puts its foot in every style
of traditional American music and never loses its balance once. Unlike many other
retro performers, Magic Music’s style never seems forced or too studied. These
songs seem like a natural and effortless expression of the experiences that go
into the songwriting and they show outstanding technique as well. Each of the
songs, even the instrumentals, don’t waste a single word or note trying to
convey themselves to the audience.
Few songs make that more apparent than the opener.
“Bring Down the Morning” is a brilliant modern folk song that’s never too
precious or affected; it seems like an intensely sincere accounting of the
speaker’s yearning and the poetic touches littering the song give it real added
verve. “Bright Sun Bright Rain” pushes much harder against the listener and has
an almost rock song like urgency without any of the histrionics. The lilting
opening of “The Porcupine Flats Shuffle” shifts tempo slightly as it goes
further in the song but it never turns into a full fledged shuffle as the title
implies. It tumbles out, instead, with a slightly staggered pulse that’s quite
pleasing all the while. The overlapping musical lines opening “Gandy Dancer”
coalesce into another quasi-shuffle peppered with tasteful melodic splashes.
The vocals are handled in harmony for much of the song with occasional changes
and the instrumental breaks are kept relatively brief in comparison to the
surrounding songs.
There’s a gradual growth in the instrumentation of
“Carolina Wind”. It begins with an almost skeletal melody and Magic Music shows
great patience in developing it for the listeners. “The Flatbush Jig” is a
brief instrumental with a haunting quality that seems to waft into form rather
than emerging fully fleshed out. Acoustic guitar is the primary musical mover
on “Eldorado Canyon” and lays out a very deliberate melody in the introduction.
It shifts into a much more fluid mode for the verses but the understatement
remains the same. There’s much more of a solo vocal at work here than the
abundance of harmonies heard in other songs and it gives it a different sort of
quality. There’s a strong blues influence in the later songs “Country” and
“Better Days”, but much like the band does with other styles, they opt for
artfully invoking its tropes rather than leaning too heavily on clichés. Much
of the men behind these songs emerges through their art and helps all of the
songs on this debut sound like no one else could have written or recorded them.
9 out of 10 stars
Charles Hatton
