Magoo ‘Popsongs’ (May Go Zero Records)
In Magoo’s long-playing career, these East Anglian stars have always had an ear for a good tune, whether it’s buried in lo-fi fuzz or tweaked to perfection in their own Sickroom studio. Besides their own output on various labels, they’ve covered songs from Captain Beefheart to Black Sabbath and even Cat Stevens (thankfully the office-singalong ‘Matthew & Son’, rather than ‘Father & Son’, as murdered by Boyzone). This new set includes a tune by the infamously out-there Guided By Voices. The set consists of two discs with four songs on each. So are all the songs really long? No, they are ‘Popsongs’.
Unlike their myopic namesake, Magoo know where they’re going and it’s in two directions. Here they’ve split their rock-side and their soft-side, so that ‘Popsongs’ is part electric party and part acoustic comedown, but the two moods don’t have to take turns for a listener’s confused attention. You could say that the first cd is one to put on before going out, and the second one to chill out on coming back in. But really you can take them anywhere.
What unites Magoo’s two sides is a desire to push the boundaries of each, whilst maintaining the fact of being ‘Popsongs’. Kicking off the electric side, ‘Robot Twin’ is keyboard-led and catchy on the dancefloor. All four songs are a burbling frenzy, especially the five minutes of guitar-shaking that constitutes the final track, where each of the band is locked into their own loose musical groove and the track might be called ‘We’re Not Superhuman’ but you’d believe a musician could fly… all good fun, ‘Laser Fight Fury’ has mischief at the centre of its stop-start heart, “like a rainbow, like an igloo… pulling my heart apart.” It’s a bit like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci playing musical chairs.
Like GZM, this band practise a whimsical pyschedelia, soft in contrast to the sometime-lumpen take on lava-lamp rock as peddled by the Coral – and if a song called ‘Trust to Love’ risks being labelled sissy, it’s a danger these sonic explorers are willing to face. CD2 brings out the loopy flutes, lifts the piano lid and adds accordion drone to ‘Chicken Blows’, and heightens the harmony on ‘We Can Belong’. Always refining their sound, these sci-fi hippies have crafted a collection that in its breadth can be compared to underground legends Yo La Tengo, and is sometimes as foot-on-amp, heart-on-sleeve, off-its-tits and balls-out lovely.
an old questionnaire / a live review of Magoo / www.thesickroom.co.uk
