Majical Cloudz, a duo of two superhumanly sincere beings from Montreal named Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto, present us with a musical equation as legible as freshly painted white highway lines. Two members, two tiny dots on a massive canvas, Welsh's bottomless longing and Otto's vapor-trails electronics. Together, they explore how much mystery can be plumbed from radical transparency, and on their 2013 album Impersonator they hit massive dividends: It remains as transfixingly direct exploration of elemental stuff—trauma, pain, death, childhood, love—I've ever heard. Every time I listen to it, I feel like something has been dredged from my dreams.
In retrospect, this aesthetic might be so well-defined that there could only ever be one perfect album of it, and Impersonator was probably it. Last fall’s follow up Are You Alone? was gentler, less wracked by fear and dread, more reliant on ballads. It was lovely, but where Impersonator flirted with bathos, Are You Alone? nearly surrendered to it. The line between "raw, uncompromising emotional honesty" and "yeeesh" is razor-thin, after all, and some types of emotional outbursts only carry their full impact once.
The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Are You Alone?, but it feels perched at this same divide, and again the balance feels slightly off. Nothing much has changed, strictly speaking. Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time. His writing hints at life-changing late-night conversations: "You said, ‘When I am dead, I will never feel this strange again,'" he sings on "Heaven." But a few releases in, his straightforward lines are beginning to sound less like powerful honesty and more like simple guilelessness, an innate and involuntary quality rather than a conscious act.
These are intangible criticisms, but music this bare traffics necessarily in intangibles. Here’s a concrete problem: The mix here sounds more conventional, and beholden to other, "normal" synth-pop, than the bizarre, featureless expanse of Impersonator and Are You Alone? On those albums, the synths didn't have clear attacks or decays; they happened in free space, so that nothing that happened felt strictly "real." Welsh’s gorgeous voice didn’t even sound quite right, like maybe he’d sung the lyrics backwards and played them forwards. It made you lean forward to listen more closely to music that was already perfectly clear: You heard what he was saying, but what was he saying? On Wait & See, Welsh and Otto have floated down to Earth a bit, and with the journey they shed a little bit of their unearthly magnetism.
The most powerful moment on the EP comes with "My Heart Soaks Up Every Drop of Your Blood," a title that feels intentionally clunky and literal. The music is at its simplest here, which is always the most vital spot for Majical Cloudz’s music. As in all of his best songs, you can’t quite tell if Welsh is being tender or murderous: "You are the seed in a pile of dust," he says, which is maybe not something you’d want whispered to you before dropping off to sleep. As always, it’s this liminal spot, somewhere between dread and comfort, that they occupy. Even if it's become more familiar to us, this is still a territory with no other real inhabitants, and at no point could you mistake this band for anyone other than themselves.
