Magik Markers: Balf Quarry

I’m writing this review having just spent a few hours listening to and reviewing the boring PJ Harvey & John Parish album which has likely been published long before this one is hitting you in the face. Now that is seemingly a pointless piece of information, but this is a record review after all people!

I did have a point actually. It’s: Fank the Heathens for Magik Markers… We’re on track two and already "fun" is the only thing on my mind. This one is called ‘Don’t Talk In Your Sleep’. I’m going to try and review this whole album in the time it takes me to have my first listen, so that after that I can’t just go and enjoy it and forget all this opinion nonsense.

Things are going well so far. This is the first time I have ever heard Elisa Ambrogio spit out funky licks from that guitar. Usually she’s either shredding staccato noise solos with her feet stuck in concrete and a magnet in the back of her brain sucking her torso down to the floor or bawling something with her hair in her face.

Wicked! ‘Jerks’ is punk as fuck. She’s talk-singing so fast it’s making my heart flutter, it’s kind of scary. Pete Nolan is bashing the drums like a bastard. This record might even turn out better than Boss, if you haven’t already bought that you’re a loser, you’ve missed the boat. Let’s get this straight; I’ve liked Magik Markers since then, not up until then. She just sang something about “neon lights” and then it ended suddenly and I felt like I was freefalling in a Ford Escort down into a bottomless canyon with bits of road barrier trailing behind me in slow motion. Yeah!

That little writerly diversion distracted me from the beginning of ‘Psychosomatic’ which is jaunty and slightly disturbing. It reminds me of the skewed piano ballad on Boss, track four if my memory serves (I haven’t the time to verify! This is an exciting experiment in rock criticism). The lyrics of that one made me think of some depraved Svengali situation, and ‘Psychosomatic’ has some of that weird prying going on. Are we safe or aren’t we? Pete and Elisa aren’t telling. Ambrogio’s singing something about what happens when you dig behind your made up problems, and Lord knows, I know all about that.

‘7/23’ has a Sunburned Hand of the Man like drum machine blipping away, with some soaring choral folk song vocals, nicely reverbed and harmonised over a drone. When I say soaring, it’s the kind of soaring where you might see a bird in the sky and it looks perfectly normal, but then the sun goes in behind the clouds and it’s actually something that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly.

Grand Piano chords and Martial Drums! That’s what’s currently opening ‘State Numbers’. There’s a weird wind blowing in the background. Perhaps it’s Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan’s recollections of a wind which once blew from the mouth of Balf Quarry, the quarry from which stone was taken since whenever the place was built and used for things as inventive as paving stones in their Connecticut hometown (No shit, Connecticut isn’t spelt Conneticut, what’s that about, Thank God I live in Cornwall). I don’t think the Cambodians used it for their jungle palace/shrines (ask Julian Cope, I only know stuff about Cornish Archaeology), which is a mistake you might make if you read the liner notes then looked at the cover. It’s a good cover. The liner notes look like they’re written in the same font that Six Organs of Admittance use for theirs, maybe that’s what’s rubbed off in the time that Elisa Ambrogio has spent playing in the band and hanging with those Six Organ folk.

Now I need to slow down right? If I keep up this kind of pace past track six then this will be a hellishly long review. ‘State Numbers’ gave some breathing space, I’m looking forward to going back and listening to the lyrics. Now we have some brooding drum rolls, kind of sub free-jazz, like punk jazz maybe, it’s good! Ambrogio's guitar is churning like a rusted steam train which is trying to use it’s whistle to talk, perhaps to explain why it is malfunctioning and rather unhappy about being woken up and given a horrible consciousness which it feels the painful need to explain and apologise for. That was called ‘The Ricecar of Dr. Clara Haber’. It’s over now and we have a very satisfying demolition ball punk rocker. Albeit punk shot through with a growling drone, low tuned guitars I reckon. Disconcerting, nice overlaid high frequency dumb plucks, bends, wah wah pedal opens up, two note solos screaming. “too bad you couldn’t make it out of bed” she says, very damningly. At least seemed that way.

I have a friend who writes emails like telegrams, perhaps his life is as urgent as a Magik Markers record. Bang Bang and it’s stopped. What next? My God! It’s like the Vivian Girls but it’s not boring and repetitive. And the guitar is more spidery and of course it’s more skewed and shot through with a disdain unique to this group. Is it wrong of me to love them for it? It’s called ‘Ohio R./Live/Hoosier’.

Now it’s the last song, which is almost eleven minutes long. It’s called ‘Shells’, one of my favourite songs of last year was called ‘Shell Skull’, so it has a lot to live up to. Accordion drones, creepy cymbal bowing or something. The rest of the record has been so good I’m kind of unfit to judge this really. I might spend the ten minutes checking my punctuation and inserting funnier words and more paragraphs.

Some interesting facts found during hasty editing:

1: I’m not lying about this review time, it really will have taken me 41 minutes and 38 seconds precisely. Except I added the thing about Connecticut (which I half regret), and this “except blah blah” sentence.

2: Spellchecker suggests Imbruglia instead of Ambrogio, which is pretty funny. Oh no I was wrong, it suggests Imbroglio. Wishful thinking!

Right on, there’s not much time left. This last track is very beautiful around the seventh minute, the fiddle and sweeter folksy vocals seem very precious and uplifting after what has gone before. Yeah the key just twisted out into something a little more unsettling, but that moment was good, it didn’t need a crowd of fair-weather Johnson chorus’ copying it.

Last few things: Pete Nolan is an excellent drummer. He just beats it out.

Ambrogio’s voice is really good, kind of sultry in places but also capable of being touching intellectually and in the heart. But most of the time they’re both just burning a nerve with a low brow stuck where a high brow should be. Final point, I bet these songs are still way better live than on record. Bye!!”!”