Here We Go Magic – Here We Go Magic

I've got to feeling slightly like a seamstress with this record - purposefully trying to stitch it together into some coherent whole so I can say something meaningful about it without leaving it as a series of sketches. I think I may have to admit defeat. What might have been an interesting collage of ideas is in reality a bit of a mess, which is fine as it goes, you just get the feeling it could have been so much more.Here We Go Magic is the latest surfacing of Luke Temple who has released a herd of albums and EPs over the last few years, the last of which Snowbeast came out in 2007 to an impressive amount of acclaim. That was a gently creaking folk record at heart, folk with a showsong edge. Key to the progression we see on Here We Go Magic though, were the odd squalls of dissonance and machine noise. Instead of merely adding colour and tone to the record however- as it did on Snowbeast - here there are whole sections given over to ambient drift and even Fennesz-like washes of treated guitar.The way the album starts though you'd have no real idea of what's to come. 'Only Pieces' could be off of There Goes Rhymin Simon or even Graceland - a gorgeous rolling song, dominated by the refrain "what's the use in dying dying, if I don't know when?", 'Fangela' continues the theme, relocating the chord progression from 'Mrs Robinson' to some weird thinly metallic tropicalia. By 'Tunnelvision' though, we're in some miasmic Animal Collective hinterland with its now familar tropes of the multi-tracked vocals, those fuzzed, deep-in-the-mix tribal drum patterns. It's not a bad track by any means but it and 'I Want to See You Underwater' (an even more AC-inflected track) feel oddly forced and awkward.What of the ambient tracks? Their inclusion is an odd choice for me. Across an album of greater scope and length they may have provided a sense of texture and narrative, but on an album that's only 38 minutes long they feel like a distraction, a wasted opportunity. Their composition is fine, as it goes - washes of glitchy fuzz and drones - they're just out of place.Temple has said somewhere that by giving himself a new moniker under which to record he was "just trying to trick myself into being re-inspired with something by calling it a new name," and that he "was just tired of being me." All of which points to some kind of block-crisis, but Temple doesn't sound blocked so much as flailing, albeit flailing interestingly. There are some great ideas, and a couple of cracking songs (the closer 'Everything's Big' for instance is a heart-cracked waltz that builds to a great crescendo) but ultimately (and I swore to myself I wouldn't resort to this metaphor but there you are) this feels like sneaking a peek at some of Temple's sketches in his other role as a Brooklyn muralist. 58%Here We Go Magic on MySpace