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Elefant music review
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Elefant The Black Magic Show
Kemado
Maybe you missed the eighties the first time around. Or maybe you were too young – too busy with Light-Brites and Cabbage Patch Kids to enjoy the John Hughes films and the Smiths. Well, thanks to NYC four-piece Elefant, it’s not too late. Now you can grab your neon and your denim, lock yourself in your bedroom, plaster the walls with Morrissey posters, toss on The Black Magic Show and pretend like it’s 1986 all over again.
Track listing:
01 Black Magic Show
02 Sirens
03 Lolita
04 The Clown
05 Uh Oh Hello
06 Why
07 Brasil
08 My Apology
09 The Lunatic
10 It's A Shame
11 Don't Wait
Formed by frontman Diego Garcia when he moved to the Big Apple from Detroit, the band are an all-star mix of every well-respected guitar-based band that took to the stage during those technicolour years between the rise of Thatcher and the (first) fall of Baghdad. There’s a little bit of everyone in The Black Magic Show: the driving acoustic guitars of Echo and the Bunnymen, the ringing lead of U2, the backwards effects of the Stones Roses, even the occasional A-Ha hook . . . all left to marinate a while in the general moodiness of Morrissey and the Smiths (“Just look into my eyes. You’re killing me with your love. Just set me free from your touch,” Garcia moans in his faux-Brit accent). It all makes it pretty hard to believe at times that this album was recorded in 2006 and not twenty years earlier. The band’s recreation of the eighties sound is so striking, you have to wonder if maybe there is more of the historian than musician in Garcia and his band.
But, as Elefant prove, just because you’ve heard it all before doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. While they may lack their own unique sound, Elefant are more than a pale imitation of the past. They hold up to the unavoidable comparisons to their forerunners without embarrassment. Garcia, might not be the next Ian Brown or Ian Curtis, but he is a strong songwriter in his own right, and any one of his bandmates could have played alongside Will Sergeant or Mani or Johnny Marr without seeming out of place. Tracks like the very good and very very Echo-esque “My Apology” prove that.
In the end, how you feel about The Black Magic Show will be an exact reflection of how you feel about the Me Decade. If you think Ian McCullough was overrated and Morrissey was a spoiled whiner, then Elefant aren’t for you. If, on the other hand, you long for the sound of the days of the Rubik’s Cube, then what are you doing still sitting here, reading this, wasting your time not owning this record? Go! Run! Quick! Get out there and buy it.
