Flak Magazine: Review of Piano Magic's Seasonally Affective, 11-30-01

Even the most die-hard, obsessive-compulsive Piano Magic fanboy has likely run into trouble trying to collect the group's numerous singles, remixes and one-off tracks. Arguably more than any other band of the past five years, Glen Johnson's collective-in-flux has excelled at putting out scads of obscure, ignored-by-journalists singles on collector-nerd record labels. Whether it's the limited-to-200-copies "Amongst the Books, an Angel" 7" on Acetone or that first 12" on i/Che, we're all likely to have slipped up somewhere.

Of course, the scarcity of much of Piano Magic's catalogue wouldn't matter one bit were the group — essentially Johnson and a fluctuating group of collaborators — not one of the more interesting, challenging, difficult-to-pin-down outfits to emerge from England in the last five years. Thankfully, the UK label Rocket Girl has issued Seasonally Affective, a low-priced, two-CD set that compiles virtually all of the band's out-of-print singles and tracks recorded for compilations.

Ever since the minimalist mood music of Popular Mechanics, Johnson has demonstrated himself a poet among mere lyricists. Though his pen has produced the occasional clunker, the hits far outnumber the misses, such as the final stanzas of "Wrong French," the first single off of Popular Mechanics and the lead-off track on Seasonally Affective.

And this hotel is dusty
and he's locked the door
and the sea's gone so far out
I can't see it anymore

I was baking when he kissed me
I put flour in his hair
He rolled me like a bottle,
whispering wrong French in my ear

The sound backing Raechel Leigh's spoken word is a captivating pastiche of sounds musical and nonmusical, merging a thunderstorm with blurry keyboard chords, a low-key drum machine and a faintly strummed, treated guitar. Decidedly eerie.

And while the collective's sound evolves even between singles, the "decidedly eerie" tag holds up, for the most part, carrying through what is essentially a sampler of the band's musical metamorphosis. And though Seasonally Affective matches neither Low Birth Weight nor the band's only US release, A Trick of the Sea, the compilation's variety makes it perhaps a better introduction to Piano Magic than any of its albums.

The most upbeat song on the compilation might be the A-side of the "For Engineers" 7" originally released on Wurlitzer Jukebox. Frenetic and mechanical, it hardly sits on a level with the group's best work, falling instead into the Johnson-noodling-around- in-his-home-studio category. Still, completists and fans of minimalist, instrumental electronic music are likely to appreciate it.

Everyone else will skip ahead to the tracks from the Fun of the Century EP. Both the title track and one of its three B-sides, "I Am the Sub-Librarian," are taken from Low Birth Weight, a moody, song-oriented tour de force that's arguably the '90s best album no one's actually heard. "The Sharpest Knife in the Drawer" is built on a circular guitar riff that slightly recalls Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" while sounding nothing like it.

The songs released between Low Birth Weight and Johnson's next album, the World War I-centered Artists' Rifles, are admittedly hit-and-miss. "Music for Rolex" foreshadows the snare-drum fetish that would tie together Artists' Rifles, while the jagged instrumentals from the "Music for Annabird" 7" on Bad Jazz are avant garde oddities likely to offend the pop sensibilities of the majority of the record-buying public. The Spacemen 3 tribute track, "How Does it Feel" and a song from the otherwise-superb Will Our Children Thank Us compilation reinforce critics' arguments that Johnson is at his best when he stays away from the microphone.

Which isn't to say there aren't plenty of stellar tracks from this period. The dirgey "French Mittens" and the delicate, Johnson-sung "Amongst the Books, an Angel" are likely to keep pop enthusiasts interested until "There's No Need for Us to be Alone" rolls around.

That song, one of two from a double A-side single featuring Darren Hayman of UK indie heavyweight Hefner, is probably Johnson's most radio-friendly moment, With gorgeous, dreampop guitars and clean, crisp production to match, it follows a fucked-up relationship through to its bitter end, with stinging lyrics straight from the (callused) heart:

When spring turned to summer
I swapped her for another
She drank herself stupid,
threw herself down the stairs

She put whiskey with her aspirin,
my records in the dustbin
She pleaded me to take her back,
I knew she would, I knew she would

By now it should be readily apparent that despite Piano Magic's pop song structures, Johnson's is not happy music. It'd be easy to call its '80s, Durutti Column-and-4AD-influenced melodies moody or gothic, but like many artists making this sort of music, Johnson transcends these influences, crafting his own beautiful take on the world's lonely, desperate characters.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)