LA / LBC / OC
Long Beach’s Magic Lantern have finally gone and released a new sonic document after what seemed like an eternity of waiting. Eagerly anticipated by those who have been biding their time waiting for the band to get on with their uber limited cassette only and CD-R releases (their Self-Titled CD-R was limited to 30), “High Beams”, the band’s latest opus [...]
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Initially released in Europe in October 2006, Blackstrap’s second full length, Steal My Horses and Run, is finally seeing it’s official release in the U.S. via New York’s Tee Pee Records.
At first pass it would be easy to write off Steal My Horses and Run as just another retread of the JAMC and My Bloody Valentine catalogs, that is if it weren’t so well executed and/or if you weren’t able to make to the last quarter of the album where the band really opens things up with some more diversified song writing. Coming across much the same as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club did on their first album, Blackstrap wear their influences (Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Neu!, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Stereolab and Suicide) on their sleeve, writing songs that would fit on any of the aforementioned bands’ albums, only with much better production.
The first four tracks on the album, “Winning Speech”, “Rough Parade”, ‘Lay Down Low” and “City Beat” are primed for the gigantic crowds and stages of the European summer festivals, sonically huge and undeniably catchy, each is a testament to the band’s ability to take the ideas of their influences and inject a new updated energy into them to create songs that are their own, but have a familiar easily digestible sound to them.
It is not until track nine that Blackstrap offer us something different, “Still Sore”, the album’s lone acoustic track, is a beautifully haunting piece of work that really shows off Maria Lindén’s (organ/vocals) voice. After a brief return to the rest of the album’s form on the title track, we are again treated to the varied sound of “I Burned Your Town”, that sounds like the European countryside looks (if that makes any sense).
Steal My Horses and Run may not be breaking any real new ground sound-wise, but what it lacks in ingenuity is made up for in precision song writing and production. Hopefully with the recent reunions of JAMC last year, Swervedriver right now and My Bloody Valentine later this Fall, there will be a larger renewed interest in this sound that seems to be forever trapped in the past, and bands like Blackstrap who are giving it new life blood will be able to take and run with it.
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