1.
Garage Goons 2.
Fever's on me 3.
Haunted Lantern 4.
Suns 5.
Tomb Legions 6.
Labor Day 7.
Summer Dive 8.
Summer Dive (redux) 9.
Rainy Dog *Bonus
Track* Paranoid HAIR
EXP:
Guitar/Vox TERROR TRANS:
Drums
100 copies Released June
2011
OUT OF PRINT
REVIEWS:
The Wire (Byron Coley) March 2012
The Sound Projector (Ed Pinsent) January 2012
More
from the Pilgrim Talk label sent to us in late October. The Pilgrims
there just keep on coming up with surprises, just after one was tempted
to tag them as a strictly “art” label. Back Magic are a duo of young
men from Illinois including the prolific Nick Hoffmann who I think runs
this label. Their Dream Lover (PILGRIM TALK PT13) is an engaging tape
of rather spooky and skeletal garage-punk toons, played with just a
guitar, drumkit, and a wailing voice. It’s futuristic rockabilly for
Halloween midnight capers. The vocalist is capable of creating some
deliciously odd effects with little more than a cheap echo unit to
propel him into the supernatural zone; at times he resembles a mad
monk, a muffled choirboy from the nether regions, or the writer of some
twisted liturgy. This adds a whiff of Black Metal undertones to what is
described by the label as “trance punk” rock. Hair EXP and Terror Trans
are brothers, and to keep things in the family they recorded this lo-fi
miniature epic on their grandfather’s tape machine. Let’s hope it was
an old Webcor or Revox 1, which might account for the faintly
disembodied tone of the tape, although a lot of the atmosphere is down
to the skilful playing on offer. The guitarist can eke out a forlorn
and stripped-down melody with the sort of shrill plangency that makes
you want to cry and shudder at the same time. Distorted heavy metal
this ain’t, although they do assay a version of The Sabs’ ‘Paranoid’ on
the B side, where the riffing is hollowed out into a shell of its
former self and the vocals are, frankly, quite freakish. A real
grower…100 copies.
