With their childlike female vocals and toybox melodies, Piano Magic's earliest records had some loose connection to indie pop, a scene that valorizes a certain kind of hermetic accessibility. But Piano Magic's music didn't feel like it was made by anyone walking around the real world. It was hard to guess who was making Piano Magic's records. On their singles compilation, 2001's Seasonally Affective, you'd get twee surrealist monologues about baking bread or reading Richard Brautigan novels backed by spooky field recordings of atmospheric disturbances. And then a tender song about small-town loneliness seemingly played on Victorian clockwork novelties; next, a blasted industrial soundscape that bore little evidence of human intervention at all.
A lot of that mysterious feeling has slowly drifted from Piano Magic's music over the last decade, as mastermind Glen Johnson seems to have decided rather firmly that he is a Serious Writer of Serious Songs. At his best, he's really more of an atmosphere and texture kind of talent, creating wonderfully unstable mood pieces that seesaw between poignancy and unease. Lyrics get pared back to evocative fragments. In traditional songwriter mode, he's too often both strident and vague, trying to forcefully put across images that don't really evoke much of anything, and becoming less sure of his skills as a homespun collage artist when he tries to tackle verse-chorus-verse.
Even more so than their suitably grim concept album about WWI, Artists' Rifles, Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet might be the starkest and most self-consciously serious Piano Magic album so far. It's also the eeriest Piano Magic album in a good long while, with a discomforted air due to the album's minimalism. A lot of it sounds like music made by a prisoner who's been allowed only a rickety old drum machine and a few half-broken electronic devices. Odd skeletal melodies play out uneasily but hypnotically against the record's yawning emptiness, like Young Marble Giants' tunes if they'd dropped the tempo to a crawl.
Way too often though, Life comes off like melodramatic goth hooey. And not the fun kind. Johnson's never been a confessional singer-songwriter, and I doubt we're even getting straight emotional autobiography here. But with the voice up front and so much negative space behind, there's an undeniable "dude sings about his feelings in an unadorned way" vibe that's new for Piano Magic. Too bad the most raw and seemingly heartfelt moments are more than likely to induce snickers. The trouble usually arises when the lyrics make the mood of dread bluntly overt. The title track is some kind of nadir in this regard. To an irritating somnambulant sea shanty rhythm, Johnson reels off line after goofily portentous line ("The gun in my hand/ But the trigger, it jammed") with total conviction but zero oomph. You might take it for a bit of dark comedy about clinical depression and suicidal ideation if it wasn't played so limp and straight.
Or maybe it's just the way he sings it. Life might have been monstrous in the hands of someone like Michael Gira, who has both the gravitas and enough of a self-mocking side to pull off such severe sentiments. What really cripples certain parts of Life, as it has so often on post-Rifles Piano Magic records, is Johnson's singing. Johnson's gloomy monotone was effective in a limited way when it was just one element in the overall gloomy swirl of his music, and when he stays in this lane on Life, it fits. But in these severe settings, his vocal flaws become all the more apparent, occasionally even grating when he tries to emote. "The Slightest of Threads" will test even the band's staunchest fan.
Piano Magic's masterpiece-thus-far, 1999's Low Birth Weight, closed with a cover of Disco Inferno's "Waking Up", a rather chilling vision of a world without God, and Johnson finally gave the song an after-the-bomb ambience to match. It was emblematic of a consistent darkness to their music; but that darkness was never all there was to the band, even though Life sometimes seems based entirely around the sound and feel of that "Waking Up" cover. Early Piano Magic songs could be fragile and precious, but also assured and unearthly, less about foregrounding the warmth and intimacy of regular people playing in a room. Instead they used sound-design and electronic color to transform songs into slightly off environments, spaces where both familiar emotions and the uncanny could be invoked, part of a long tradition of British art where strange and ineffable goings-on intrude on the mundane world. There are still hints that Johnson still knows where his talents lie on Life Has Not Finished With Me Yet, but they're the faintest hints.
