White Magic
Issue #30
Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (Drag City)
By Elizabeth Barker
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
A few months after the release of White Magic’s debut EP in 2004, Through the Sun Door, I caught the band’s early-afternoon set at the otherwise superfun All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival in Long Beach, California. Hours before, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne rolled out over the crowd in his giant plastic bubble and Peaches karaoked the Team America theme with Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes. That day, ex-Quix*o*tic member Mira Billotte took the stage in a muumuu and dragged White Magic through a batch of brilliantly mopey folk songs that were both beautiful and boring as hell — I loved it to death, but my friends ditched me two songs in and headed back to the beer tent.
With the band’s first full-length, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus, White Magic reaffirm its status as the most-genuine weird kids in the indie-rock talent show. But unlike the hordes of bands that flaunt their own strangeness with exhibitionistic vigor, this Brooklyn trio abandons any attempt at charisma for total immersion in their sleepy, sometimes near-dreary take on British folk music.
Most of the new album’s 12 tracks endlessly repeat the same plodding tempo and monotone-yet-lovely guitar, piano, and vocal patterns, so that any variation automatically infuses its sound with an ethereal energy that saves the record from tedium (see the quiet dance of a two-string fiddle on “All the World Wept,” the slightly jazzy swing of “Palm and Wine,” some reggae-inflected guitar effects on “Song of Solomon”). Though it may be impossible to get through all of Dat Rosa Mel Apibus without slipping into a temporary depression — or at least accidentally taking a nap — those enchanted and ephemeral moments just might be enough to make White Magic worthy of your winter soundtrack.
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