![]() ![]() ![]() These strings reappear to better, more subtle effect on “Little Rock ‘n’ Roller,” the high watermark for tracks featuring Rattigan’s new, silky style. ![]() While this interruption is novel, it doesn’t add much of anything to the song’s appeal. One of the strangest moments on the entire record comes when a string quartet and piano break into the mix in the song’s final minute. “Unwell” is a particularly interesting departure - at just over six minutes, it’s the band’s longest track to date, and eschews the standard pop song structure that has helped so much of their work to feel as tight and fun as it does. Songs like “Sugar,” “Lost Honor” and “Unwell” achieve a synthesis, combining bright guitars and smooth vocals in their verses with raucous riffs and screams in their respective choruses and bridges, blending the two charmingly. This pattern of harsh, teenage-dirtbag connoting punk followed by britpop and a Cocteau Twins homage is a theme throughout the record, but the two styles are not always as cleanly divided as in the beginning. The milk that Rattigan speaks of flows freely here, as the newly doubled guitars and softly played bass lay on a fuller sound reminiscent of the dream pop of the late 80s and 90s. It sounds exactly like one of many album tracks off 2017’s “Nothing Yet,” and an unwitting listener might be duped into expecting the next songs to follow suit. What emerges is a split record, with songs alternately violent and velvet, coming off as either charming or aggravating but always inconsistent. The addition of Henry Dillon’s bass and Noah Kholl’s extra guitar heralds a significant shift toward, in Rattigan’s words, a “milky'' feel, antithetical to the lo-fi, post-punk sound that has characterized the band’s best work for years, including the perennially viral “Freaks.” However, this familiar sonic signature is far from abandoned, flaring up on lead-off track “Arrow” and lead single “TVI,” scraps of the old sound scattered throughout an LP that is otherwise striving for reinvention. ![]() Each of Surf Curse’s LPs have featured the band on the cover, but “Magic Hour” - the group’s fourth full-length release and only project since 2019’s “Heaven Surrounds You” - is the first time the portrait has included more contributors than founding drummer, vocalist and frontman Nick Rattigan and guitarist Jacob Rubeck. ![]()
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