Sometimes an email appears in my inbox that paints a band in such a fine light, that I'll take a moment out to investigate said new band and their earnest attempts at music. However, in Piano Magic's case, they're not a new band at all, but a group embarking on an 11th album. I really should pay more attention.
With the media increasingly suffering from an antsy preoccupation with incessant pen hopping, from brand new thing to brand new thing, it's rather heartening to find a band of this calibre so late into a career. Rather than follow the downward trajectory of most bands approaching an album in double figures, Piano Magic manage to create something fresh, to pluck some light from the darkness, to mix together their black paints and get freak specks of white, and to forge a record of intensity and sometime beauty, peppered with humour and self-depreciation.
It's hard to pick highlights, Piano Magic are not a traditional singles band, but as a work in its entirety, "Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet" treads carefully and confidently, with minimal electronics and downbeat, nursery rhyme melodies. This is bleak music, for a summer that doesn't ever want to kick in. From the unexpected, Cale-esque shards of guitar noise that encase "The Slightest Of Threads" at the 3 minute point, to the fantastic "(The Way We Treat) The Animals" there is plenty to keep fans and new fans alike interested here.
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The influence of Dead Can Dance hangs heavily over this record and, from what I've read, this artist but there are points where the textures even rival and echo some of Trent Reznor's recent soundtrack work and, elsewhere, there is a funereal atmopshere that can rival some of Leonard Cohen's earlier work.
A strong record, a fine one even, and a nighttime album because, afterall, these goths really do have a torrid time in the heat, don't they?
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