Magic Mang

I recently had the good for­tune to see post-Postal Ser­vice indie synth whatever-core band Magic Man, kicking ass in an over­cast, early time slot of a cer­tain Fes­tival of Spring­time Abandon. Sorta home­town heroes that they were, they played their hearts out for handful of their goofy, adoring col­lege kid fans, and watching them it occurred to me: these guys are gonna be famous.

Well, soon anyway. There’s a pre­co­cious­ness to them that could stand to mellow a bit. Con­sider the back­story, in which child­hood friends Sam Lee and Alex Kaplow go to France for a summer, work on an organic farm, and mix down the album on their Mac­books. C’mon dudes. Jason and Ben once tried a sim­ilar thing in Lake Worth, working at the YMCA and recording onto a mini­disc. It kind of sounded like Light­ning Bolt.

Like this neatly-wrapped slice of summer resume building, their debut album Real Life Color has a sense of dili­gent over­achieve­ment. They less evoke their var­ious influ­ences than splice them together in a way that can seem simulacrum-ly. My favorite song of theirs, “Mon­ster,” is a well-researched com­posite of indie dorm-room bangers. I hear Ezra Koenig fronting the Postal Ser­vice cov­ering Arcade Fire, basi­cally. But despite some lyrical mis­steps (“a silver spoon to feed me lies”? really?) it’s a fright­en­ingly good approx­i­ma­tion, and these con­sid­er­a­tions are more or less for­gotten in the fun of lis­tening to it. Espe­cially live, where Kaplow bounces like a pin­ball across the stage, brushing the hair out his eyes and crowing into the mic like a bantam rooster.

And that’s the thing. It strikes me that they’re enjoying them­selves, pro­cessing their influ­ences in a way that doesn’t feel par­tic­u­larly cal­cu­lated. And if they’re this good this early, well fuck. How good will they be after life throws them a few sucker punches and broken hearts? Sam will be grad­u­ating from Yale in mere weeks, after all. I can’t help but think of another pair of New Eng­land col­le­giate break­outs, who hap­pened to be head­lining the same fes­tival. They started out doing some­thing pretty dis­tinc­tive and then unex­pect­edly segued into an album of genre exer­cises. It seems like Magic Man just might be on the oppo­site trajectory.

Magic Man’s album Real Life Color is avail­able for free, in all of its glory, here.