If you were up front during a Magik Markers show in 2004, singer Elisa Ambrogio might have handed you her guitar. And there you'd be, effectively on stage improvising in the eye of a violent noise jam with Pete Nolan going ape on his drums and former bassist Leah Quimby punching her bass beside you. You would’ve been apart of Magik Markers’ unformatted anti-songs, whose structure and shape could hardly be charted in the moment. They'd maybe make more sense later on one of the over 50 releases they put out on LP, cassette, and CD-R and hawked at the merch table after the show. There was a time when Magik Markers didn’t put much stock into the idea of “songs,” whether as a dialectical comment on performer vs. audience, as an act of political dissidence, or because they simply loved making noise music.
Truth is, they were just being honest. Read any interview with Ambrogio over the years, and one of the recurring themes is an all-eclipsing necessity to tell the truth with her music. Earlier this year, she said, “…telling the truth has the potential when done right to communicate a massive experience: the smaller and more precisely an honest human thing is rendered, is the more common it becomes.” This is somewhat tautological (few artists ride hard for “lying”), and it’s hardly a revelation in the big scheme of creating art, but the decade-long journey from the early days of Magik Markers to Surrender to the Fantasy is largely about mapping how they express themselves as performers and songwriters. And while intentions can be dubious, what emerges in Magik Markers' first album in almost four years is their formerly hidden songcraft, at once small and precise.
Surrender has been fermenting on two-inch in the years following 2009’s Balf Quarry. Recorded partially in J Mascis’ Attic in Amherst, MA, partially at Ambrogio's dad’s basement in the band’s hometown of Hartford, CT, and at many East Coast practice spaces in between, the band takes the focused quality of their recent output and at long last adds warmth. For all the different environments that Ambrogio, Nolan, and new bassist John Shaw recorded in, they managed to sedate chaos into 45 minutes of form and shape. These are more “songs” like the band has been making since 2007's BOSS, but for semantic’s sake, the band hasn’t been writing “songs” since BOSS so much as they’ve been better at whittling down what they’ve always done, being sure to leave all the knots and lathe marks in the final product.
They've finally and cautiously surrendered themselves fully to melody. Ambrogio opens the album on “Crebs” singing sweetly, “Everything about me feels so free” and the following songs stick pretty close to that sentiment. It's a natural step-though, and if you factor in Ambrogio’s bare songs as 200 Years (her collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny) and the band's recent friendship with labelmates/tourmates/split-EP-mates Sic Alps, the math checks out. “Mirrorless” has a cool desert look, riding on red-eyed fuzz and reverb, while the beautiful "Young" features little more than an acoustic guitar and a cello. The tenor of these songs are a far cry away from when Ambrogio sang, “This gun was made to pull the trigger” in 2007.
All the violence and spit of early Magik Markers now manifests itself in subtler ways than broken amplifiers and feedback squalls. They dip into amphetamine-surf rock with "Bonfire", fully booted Neil Young explorations in "Acts of Desperation", and shredded Shaggs via closer "WT". The heart of the album, however, beats in the near-seven-minute treatise "American Sphinx Face". Like Patti Smith and Kathleen Hanna before her, Ambrogio's fearless stream of conscious delivery is a coil of surrealism, politics, and intense love. Whereas much of Surrender takes a more conventional lyrical approach (the pointed platitude of "Youth" goes, "The worst part about being young/ Is thinking nothing ever comes”), Ambrogio's words on "American Sphinx Face" are delivered unsung, unadorned behind some proto-Markers psych-improvisation. "I intend to be loved and see how it goes," she says dryly. As the noise of the song grows wider and wider, Ambrogio sharpens her tongue: "In America every man is a king/ No good king but a dead king." The towering song gives shape and meaning to the tender pieces that surround it.
The risk to explore more "pedestrian" forms—to lay bare songs into the common world of structure, hushed melodies, and harmonies—gives Surrender a varied topography. The tiny moments of vulnerability in Ambrogio's voice or Nolan's barely-there drumming are buoyed by their noisy nature and their surreal sketches. More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years. Surrender could be viewed as a kind of acquiescence to plots and narratives, the kind Ambrogio was so opposed to when she started the band, back when chaos ruled. But to me this is leaning closer toward a more universal expression told in the Markers' own way—a set of honed truths that communicate on grand scales.
