I feel like I need to grapple with the fact that I'm biased against unknown bands. I acknowledge the fact that good art can come from anywhere, and so why not some random fucking dude from Ann Arbor, but I still end up approaching that art with more skepticism than I would if the artists were "known" on a larger scale. The internal bias is set up so that I subconsciously believe that, if an artist really was worth checking out, then I'd have heard of them already. The fact that I haven't heard of them means that they probably aren't that good, according to this cognitive fallacy.
Magic Toaster is not a band I have ever heard of. When you google the name of the guy who calls himself "Magic Toaster," his name being Erez Levin, then you'll discover that there is a competitive cyclist from Israel named Erez Levin who placed 18th in the National Championships in 2013. It's not till the ninth google hit that you'll find our Erez Levin, whose student recital at his alma mater included renditions of "Born to Run," "Wannabe," and the Abbey Road medley. I think it's safe to say that if a friend of friend hadn't known a guy who knew a guy, then I would've lived the rest of my life without ever hearing the phrase "Magic Toaster."
And yet, shvt vp and enjoy the weather is so good that it has made me reconsider what it means to be "known," whether being "known" even fucking matters, and whether I'm that much of a stupid fuck up that I'll ever approach any art with any sense of skepticism ever again. Who gives a FUCK who knows who or how, this is a great album, and everything else collapses into that one single fact.
It's not perfect, maybe not even in that ballpark, but man, what a joy to explore this hitherto unknown entity. It's one of those albums that makes you feel like you've known it your whole life, even if you don't actually know it in the brief time you've actually spent with it.
I'll be honest, I've been listening to it the entire week and even now I'm struggling with how to talk about the album. It's not that it's bad or anything—a mix of the 1975 and Guster sounds like it would be awful, but it really isn't. I'm also not saying it's a "mystery" like Invisible or something like that. I can feel what Magic Toaster is getting at. I'm just struggling with how to put it in words. Those feelings appear to be ineffable, in a way. Or maybe it's just a failure on my part, I don't know. I never said I was a good writer.
Oh sure, I could point to the usual suspects. I could say that "this album really lifts off when there's some power behind the songs," stuff like the tempo finally picking up in "windfall outboy" feels like a change in the season, like the great groove of "banger surpreme," like the shift in direction about 3/4ths through "blue night oberon," like the summer party music of that big bright chorus in "pong loser." None of these examples are surprising, because I always talk about those types of musical moments for any album that I like, regardless of whether I'm familiar with the artist beforehand or not.
But I don't think that does it justice this time. shvt vp and enjoy the weather felt like something more than that, more than a sum of the usual parts. I found beauty in the spaces in between this time too. "bushwick" is slower than I usually prefer, but still found a way to get to me, its sadness becoming my own sadness. "you're gonna be fine" is even slower than that, but the drums kick in halfway through and it grows a little, and so the sadness at the beginning is justified. Even "whiskey at the club," which at first seems like a bit of an outlier, with its almost doo-wop style elements, hits at some core emotion that I sometimes ignore within myself, an emotion that not many pieces of music have the ability to get to.
This also isn't a Ted Leo thing. I think the sadness on this album is up front, unhidden, obvious, and if the purpose of this album was to convey that particular emotion, then it is successful. Maybe not sadness, maybe a general melancholy. The general theme—without access to the lyrics, but I'm getting this sense anyway—is a sadness for "growing up," I guess. YES of COURSE I'm going to fall for the trap. NOSTALGIA, yeah man, I always have ears for artists lamenting through this particular phenomenon. That's what Magic Toaster is here for. I'm here for it too.
There's a lot of singing about wasting time, about way back when, just generally about how time is water in the palm of your hand and you can't hold onto anything forever. Well worn topics? Sure. But I personally have a penchant for self-mythologizing and over-nostalgizing and what have you. I'm going to a wedding tonight, a wedding in which one of my best friends is getting married. Of course my mindset this week leading up to it has been on the "how we got here" with him and some of my other friends and all that goopy nostalgic stuff, in anticipation of the night that we celebrate it. And of course this is the type of album that is going to hit that sweet spot in such a context.
So I dunno, when I said earlier that I was having trouble writing the words that could adequately describe what I felt, maybe that was a lie. Maybe I really just didn't want to say it, because it seemed to simple, too cliché. I totally feel you if you scoff at this album because you don't like considering ideas like nostalgia and "the good ol' days" and all that. But for what feels like the 467th time in an album review, I'll say: that's where I live, baby. And Magic Toaster gets it.
The most important takeaway from this experience, though, is not that Magic Toaster is speaking my language, but that they proved that it doesn't have to be a known entity speaking that language for me to understand it. I didn't know Magic Toaster before this week, and that meant I was ready and willing to bring the skepticism. No need for any skepticism here. They are no longer unknown. On the contrary, one week in and Magic Toaster is feeling like an old friend.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
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