Here’s the scenario: you’re a four-piece traditionalist rock band of uncommon background (West London via New York and Trinidad) who graduated from outsider status to Mojo and Jools Holland-level exposure on the back of a double platinum first album.
Unable to believe your luck, you tour relentlessly until you run out of tour support and spare socks and reluctantly return to base in order to contemplate that time-honoured question of what to do for an encore. Do you: a) hole up in Snowdonia for five years in order to explore Lithuanan folk music, Tangerian drones and Krautrock throb; b) hatch a triple CD concept album/rock opera based on Ayn Rand’s unpublished shopping lists; or c) repair to a mountaintop studio in upstate New York and throw down a dozen odd tunes composed on the tour bus without undue fussing, in-fighting or arty angst?
No stogies for guessing which option the steadfastly pragmatic Magic Numbers chose. The result of those Woodstock sessions, released just 17 months after their debut, is Those The Brokes, an accomplished but uncontroversial second album that sticks rigidly to the template established by its predecessor. Not that adhering to form and formula is necessarily a bad thing. Shakespeare did it. So did Chuck Berry. And to be fair, there are a few minor variations here, most notably string arrangements by Robert Kirby (who wrote the charts for Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter), and a dollop of blue-eyed white soul on tracks like ‘Undecided’.
But in an age of faster-pussycat frenzy and insatiable appetites for new baubles, is it enough to merely remake your debut with a few extra bells on? The answer is, enough to be going on with, but not enough to dazzle. Tunes like ‘You Never Had It’ and ‘Boy’ work on the same level as Neil’s Harvest, The Jayhawks or the big Mac, providing non-stodgy musical comfort food for those of us too heartsick for cleverality. And while Nick Hornby and Q-approved middlebrow notions of ‘real’ music and ‘proper’ songs usually make me reach for the barf bucket, the Magic Numbers are hard to fault; equal parts post-punk economy and Van Dyke Parks/Beach Boys harmony, Al Stewart fronting the Kings Of Leon, or Dennis Wilson backed by Teenage Fanclub.
Certainly, few bands could kick off an album with a tune whose main refrain goes “This is a song” and not sound perfunctory. There’s an unspoiled enthusiasm evident in their West Coast meets Anglo-indie jangle that’s a tonic when set next to your latest Velvets clones whose definition of radical extends as far as wearing Ray-Bans after teatime.
However, they’re not the kind of band to rock you like a hurricane either. Those The Brokes leaves your reviewer with the problem of how to convincingly convey the (moderate) pleasures of an album that inspires lukewarm adjectives like ‘pleasant’ and ‘appealing’. It’s an album you wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crisps, but after half an hour in its company the mind does tend to wander towards thoughts of eating crisps in bed.
So then, no car crashes or earthquakes, no famine, floods or plagues of locusts, just an efficient and unpretentious rock band doing their thing, second time around.
Hmm. Wonder what’s on the telly?