Here We Go Magic - Pigeons
In certain circles, a significant weight of expectation was placed on this album leading up to its release. Excited by the freeform lo-fi of Here We Go Magic’s debut (recorded solo by Luke Temple on a creaky old four-track), discerning psych heads across the interweb heralded HWGM as the next Grizzly Bear. I can sorta see it, too: with the expansion of the band to a fully functioning four-piece, Pigeons was nicely positioned to be their Yellow House. The fact that it’s not shouldn’t engender disappointment so much as a realignment of expectations.
Here We Go Magic are wanderers for sure. None of the songs on this record feel particularly scripted, structured, or built up out of cohesive chunks. Temple still communicates best through small loops and repetitions of melodic fragments, while his band seems intent on exploring the transformative power of tight, endless grooving in the spirit of the krautrock forefathers they’re being increasingly compared to. Sure, as part of their aimless, scattershot approach, they try on a handful of different genre hats throughout Pigeons, but whether they’re vibing on free-folk, new wave, electro bounce, or narcotic drift, there’s a general consistency to their musical form. Two artists that spring to mind as helpful comparisons are Dan Deacon and Caribou. On his last album, Deacon built up huge blocks of dense rhythm and texture that flew by at a furious pace, but he took his time making shifts in tone and melody. The overall effect was a glacial sublimity—the sound of a big, majestic thing moving slowly. But where Deacon’s aesthetic is inherently solipsistic, Temple’s thin, high voice lends him a distinctly boyish air, making him sound caught up and overpowered by the musical rush instead of acting as the source of it. His vocal character strongly recalls Caribou’s Dan Snaith, who’s spent his entire career jumping from one album-sized stylistic inflection to another. Pigeons’ harmonic richness and jammy ethos shares a lot of common ground with Snaith’s turn toward sunshine psych on 2007’s Andorra, but it’s also of a piece with this year’s Swim, which shies away from more formal song structures and looks to the repetitions of electronic dance music.
Take all this with a grain of salt, of course, as the links between HWGM and these other artists is more structural and ethical than aesthetic. Opener “Hibernation” lays out a pretty clear outline for Pigeons’ agenda. Warm, tight drums are led by a rounded, almost-muddy bass (one of the record’s most consistent sounds) while guitars and keys twinkle and loop, giving Temple a busy backdrop on which to place his hollow sentiments. “In the weary daylight / I do what I am told / in the weary daylight / I’m old,” he sings, playing against his bandmates’ twisty stew instead of matching it. “Collector,” the first pre-release track, follows on its heels. It’s rightfully considered the album’s standout because it brims with an attractive and relentless energy that doesn’t ever fall into the meditative vibe of much of the rest of Pigeons. As such, it’s been credited by many as the most krautrock-influenced song on the record, but despite its driven tempo and repeating organic figures, the song has more of a skyward thrust than the lateral pastoral beauty we associate with early German electropop. “I’ve got a mild fascination for collectors,” yelps Temple, sounding engaged and whimsical, “where’d you find all that time / a place for everything in your house?” The lyric has the same musing quality as most of HWGM’s output, but here it’s rendered upbeat and quirky by the band’s singular delivery. No wonder fans and bloggers alike pinned their hopes on it.
After an abrupt cut-off, Pigeons takes its first left hand turn with the wonky bossa-nova of “Casual.” The tempo gets dialed back a bit as Temple supplements his squeaks with pleasant harmonies that do a better job of conjuring a deep, drifting vibe than the instrumental ostinatos. “It’s casual, not heartbreaking / so casual, not mind-shaking,” they repeat, perhaps tacitly acknowledging the muted effect of the song itself. From here, the record’s middle section spreads out in several directions, always on the verge of losing the listener. “Surprise” trades on a sparer rhythm section and melodically-focused guitars that add up to a sleek, cosmopolitan attitude on the verses. Those get balanced out by some meanderingly pretty psych passages, but the song ultimately wanders off in circles, overstaying its welcome by about two minutes. “Bottom Feeder” shoots for a more traditional indie rock ballad, but Temple’s mush-mouthed verses can’t maintain the interest that his wordless ‘oooooh’ interludes can. The band battles multiple personalities on “Moon,” the rhythm section playing angular electro-rock while Temple floats in detached etherea, and “Old World United” jumps back and forth between marchy new-wave and the lovable rinky-dink organs of New Zealand indie pop bands like The Clean.
“F.F.A.P.” comes off something like an atmospheric Radiohead ballad (but without the stuttering drums) and “Land of Feeling” finds Temple’s voice creaking and a little too thin to sell the song’s sketch of a melody, but the two closing tracks show some light at the end of Pigeons’ bleary tunnel. “Vegetable or Native” loops and layers the titular phrase into a surprisingly sticky ‘hook,’ which flits among a host of tinkling percussion tracks, descending into pure ambience at the song’s middle only to emerge briefly from the fog before puttering out. It’s one of the few tracks on the album where the band seem to embrace their own fragmented style, capitulating to the dreamy repetitions to which they’re better suited. Closer “Herbie I Love You, Now I Know” also makes use of clattering world percussion, but it functions more like old school glitch music. Chopped and truncated notes stack up in random sequence, coming off something like a smooth, tropical jazz CD riddled with scratches and skips.
Because of its uneven structure and quality, Pigeons won’t likely captivate casual listeners or win Here We Go Magic a large new audience. Call that failure if you must, but given Temple’s previous work I think it’d be more than a little unfair to expect this band to go full-on pop. They make state-of-mind music, songs that lend themselves to things like meditation or sleeping. It’s not boring, it just doesn’t impact the active conscious mind so much as massage the subconscious. If that sounds like sissy yoga talk to you, well, you’ve uncovered the biggest quarrel people have with Here We Go Magic. If they’re a jam band pretending to be indie, they’re at least a pretty good one, as paradoxical as it may sound.
