Blending beat with beauty, Magic Wands manage to make music which is driven by a tightly-wound, energetic engine room yet simultaneously the stuff of blissed out, sonic dreamscaping, and that is a hard thing to pull off. But pull it off they do and Blue Cherry is all the proof that you need. Dream dance perhaps? Call it what you will, it is music at a crossroads, between the clubland dance floor and the nearby chill-out room, between rigid grooved pop and hazy, ethereal vocal washes, a place where the solid sound of modern music seem to be breaking down and turning into some sort of drifting, gaseous musical form.
You can hear the echoes of post-punk pioneers past floating through their musical space but it is an influence which seems to be acquired by infusion or some form of musical osmosis as it quickly becomes apparent that this is a band which, like Beach House and Warpaint before it, are nothing if not forward-facing, not to mention forward-thinking.
Blue Cherry throbs with an eclectic, electric pulse but it also seems to float along driven by soft sonic winds, it establishes some solid beat-structures to act as a platform and then proceeds to cover that space with gossamer textures, shimmering suggestions and hazy, half-hidden sonics. The former anchors everything down perfectly stopping things from becoming too ambient and untethered, the latter softens the musical edges to the point where the myriad sounds are felt in the heart rather than heard in the brain.
Pop perfection!
[…] I said when musing over the previous single, Blue Cherry, the great thing about Magic Wand’s sound is that it is both confident and muscular whilst being […]