Piano Magic occupies an odd space in the indie music landscape. They've released around a half-dozen full-lengths of various kinds, including at least one near-masterpiece (1999's Low Birth Weight), an excellent ambient release as part of Darla's Bliss Out series (A Trick of the Sea, from 1998), and a concept album about the first World War (2000's Artists Rifles), yet their profile in America remains remarkably low. Partly because they're difficult to track (the personnel in the band changes constantly, and they release and re-release music in every format available), even dedicated music press consumers come across Piano Magic only occasionally. You could almost say that their coverage and fan murmurings mirror the actual music; rather than being shouted from the rooftops, Piano Magic hype spreads via intimate whispers.
The word on the street about Writers Without Homes since its release in late 2002 has been almost uniformly negative. Few Piano Magic fans hear it as anything but a disappointment. Listening to it a couple months after most observers have had their say, it occurs to me expectations for this band are high, and this record has been graded on a curve. It's a good thing to expect a lot of a band, and Piano Magic, brilliant as they've been on occasion, is expected to turn out something great. This album certainly never approaches that high plateau, but it still has its pleasures.
But one thing is for sure: Writers Without Homes is definitely as moody and beautifully recorded as any Piano Magic I've heard. Glen Johnson has a tremendous grasp of how to convey feeling through sound, particularly with the guitar. The high, rapid arpeggios that follow the booming drums into the void on "(Music Won't Save You from Anything But) Silence" are tense and harsh, like a thick rope cinched around your chest. The plucked acoustic on the lovely one-minute folk tune "It's the Same Dream That Lasts All Night" is so rich and powerful you forget that it provides the only music behind Suzy Mangion's heavily reverbed voice. And the positively Frippertronic whine of James Topham's electrified viola that winds its way through "Already Ghosts" is by far the best thing about the track.
And there's the rub: For all the album's lovely sounds, the bulk of the actual songs on Writers Without Homes are not particularly memorable. The quietly spoken lyric atop the gurgling bed of wistfulness is a Piano Magic staple, but the tracks using this technique here are remarkably flat. While something like "Snow Drums" from Low Birth Weight was packed with remarkable lyric detail to make the words come to life, tracks here like "Certainty" and "Dutch Housing" just kind of lay there without depth like a pretty doily.
The only unarguably great song is "The Season is Long", which features John Grant of The Czars harmonizing with himself on the chorus, "Don't you ever think that you might love me?" It makes me think of one of Kurt Cobain's best lines: "I miss the comfort in being sad." Once you have someone in your life who does love you, you get a bit melancholy about how deeply a song like "The Season is Long" could cut you when you were alone. That track aside, however, Writers Without Homes is ultimately a nice sounding record without the emotional weight that makes Piano Magic special.
