Magic Lantern: High Beams (2008)

This’ll sound silly and it is, but when a band’s MySpace page lists the following groups - Can, Spacemen 3, Faust, Black Sabbath – I gotta pay attention. I don’t know if that’s shallow and short sighted since there are certainly groups that would claim those touchstones and just plain old stink, but Magic Lantern’s different. They’re just good and are some how are able to include a great deal of variety into an every confining genre. They won’t affect music as a whole and probably in a few years no one’s gonna know who they are, but what they’ve raved up so far is beyond reproach.

Apparently, these folks released a few tapes themselves prior to getting snapped up by the West Coast’s Not Not Fun. And while that label is known for it’s spaced out take on rock based musics, Magic Lantern is kind of a big deal – again, they probably aren’t gonna get huge, but the band’s already played on NPR in a sort of mystical fluke that if they were more song oriented may have yielded a flood of attention. But this band made up of avowed film geeks – and not necessarily the good kind…a bit snooty – does seem to have a sense of what and how it wants to make and disseminate its tunes.

Those tunes, which do include a good amount of space to maneuver around it, still maintain a pretty strict structure – you can hear those key changes coming. And while each song might push past the five minute mark, for whatever reason, High Beams, is only about 20 minutes long. There’s no explaining that. It’s not them being lazy, otherwise the three songs that make up the disc, which was released last year, wouldn’t have come off so well. But I really can’t figure that one out. They mighta run outta the weed amidst recording, gone home for more and forgotten to reconvene. Just a guess.

But over the three songs that make up High Beams, Magic Lantern is somehow able to include that list of bands above in one way or another. The music isn’t funky, like Can, and there aren’t any vocals, but the repetitive aspect is there. The Spacemen check makes a bit more sense seeing as the group has its ambient tendencies. Faust’s, kinda the same thing as Can, but more rock oriented, so ok. And Sabbath. Well, these guys do get kinda heavy at times.

“Deathshead Hawkmoth,” the discs’ ridiculously titled opener, is the most aggressive piece of music here. And when set against the following “Feasting on Energy,” which features a good deal of maraca and keyboard over top of a subtle drone, it comes across as some stoned, lost ‘70s classic. Really, that’s not even hyperbole. The one problem that these guts are gonna run into, though – apart from the fact that the circles they now move in are all based on a cottage industry – is the fact that there are roughly fifty bands in every major city across the country doing the same thing. And while that shouldn’t stop this Long Beach ensemble, it might make them disappear a bit earlier than they’d have hoped.