Here We Go Magic have managed to create an album that resembles that crazy maze from the bizarre Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle. Listening to Pigeons, the listener is blissfully unaware of what is around each corner, much like the hapless contestants of that particular show. Whatever is behind each door may be shocking, but it may also be quite the opposite. However, the surprises on this album do not include a 47-year old pedophile from Sapporo dressed as a ninja trying to claw at your genitalia, instead the surprises are in the form of the amazing breadth of styles and sounds represented from track to track and the ease in which it is performed.
Around one corner, the band are doing their finest Magic Numbers impression on "Collectors". Eager rhythms with crisply-toned vocals projected onto a soupy background which all together act as a jet pack that lifts you to places where the air is thin, the breeze brisk and the sky is an impossible azure, whilst its lyrics paradoxically explore a dark and dusty sideboard clinging on to artifacts from the past.
The next corner reveals a surprise in, erm, "Suprise", a song pulling you back down to terra firma with its tightly wound paranoia. "Change happens without warning", Temple intones, encapsulating the mood of the album wonderfully in a track that ambles along, smoldering and simmering slowly for almost 6 minutes. It is an unlikely success.
Keep walking and you will find behind each door rhythms and guitar strumming patterns stolen from the book on how to write a heavy metal song whilst somehow sounding nothing like a heavy metal song ("Moon"), melancholy and self-deprecating tenderness (Temple laments being "handsome in all the wrong places" on "Bottom Feeder") and instrumentation that could have been pilfered from any number of indigenous tribes around the world ("Vegetable or Native").
Ultimately, when one emerges from the end of the maze that is Pigeons, one feels richer for the experience. An unpredictable trip through some wonderfully disparate sounds makes this album a stand out. It may not always be a pleasant surprise, but overall the experience is fabulous and is one you will not regret indulging in.
Pigeons is out today on Secretly Canadian/Inertia.
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