Eight years have passed since Daniel Todd and James Smith wrought exmagician from the ashes of Cashier No. 9 with 2016’s Scan the Blue, but when the resultant fruits of such a gap are the nine songs that make Sit Tight (geddit?) one of the best albums to come out of Ireland this year, it’s more than worth the wait.
Sit Tight kicks off with lead single ‘Sharpen These’, an excellent track that leans heavily on T. Rex, with melodies Marc Bolan would have been proud of, and some scuzzy guitar tones reminiscent of Ty Segall’s 2016 LP of garage psych T. Rex covers, Ty Rex.
Beyond the glam influence on the opening track, exmagician’s second offering is laden with nods to the 1960s, mainly in the form of West Coast-inflected psychedelic pop that you’d swear was on a Nuggets compilation if you didn’t know any better.
The organ-heavy ‘Guidelines’ owes much to the Electric Prunes, but it’s on ‘Losing My Flair’ that the pair put their own stamp on the genre. The weird beeps and boops at the beginning of the song are an indicator of things to come on this, one of the stand-out tracks on the album. On the surface, ‘Losing My Flair’ combines a very country song structure with ethereal Californian pop vocals, but the odd instrumentation rendered into something resembling a late-60s Keith Richard lick adds something original to the mix.
As was the case for much of the music that informs Sit Tight, exmagician’s shimmering instrumentation often sugarcoats dark and cynical lyrical content. The sonic nonchalance of ‘Keep Your Nose Clean’ is accentuated by laid-back acoustic guitar playing and the Belfast accent that lends itself so well to indifference. The track’s lyrics, however, are far from complacent, warning of “lost souls under close control” and “closed minds [with] an axe to grind”. Though the album predates the brazen racist violence that plagued our streets in the summer, it is difficult not to view these lines as a portent of the ongoing rise of the right wing.
The record’s sceptical outlook, though never again as sharp as on ‘Keep Your Nose Clean’, continues through the album with references to demagogic windbags (‘Dulliard’) and a “flag city” (‘Instinct’) – I wonder where that could be…
It’s not all doom and gloom, though: in fact, exmagician provide a perfect antidote to the broad cynicism that permeates the rest of the album on Sit Tight’s closing track. The sublime ‘Coast’, a beautiful paean to a romantic love grounded in mutual encouragement, is the perfect salve for the world-weary listener who has been beaten down by the kinds of issues alluded to elsewhere on the record.
