THE MAGIC NUMBERS – THE RUNAWAY
With regular comparisons to everyone from The Flaming Lips to the Mamas and the Papas, The Magic Numbers are the kind of band everyone is wishing could, or would. That is, would realise the obvious potential that they have hinted at on two previous albums. The Runaway starts off on another tangent completely, with the opening song The Pulse pure Mercury Rev-lite, not the beginning one had hoped for. But The Magic Numbers are prepared to experiment if nothing else. There are a number of Fleetwood Mac moments, Why Did You Call the most obvious and annoying. When they get a bit of balls and make statements like the Big Star-esque A Start With No Ending they get it so right, and one can see that promise again. Similarly The Sound of Something both describes what they are doing – “There’s a sound, there’s a sound, there’s a sound / I don’t know what I keep thinking of / I want to start again – and demonstrates how it is when they succeed. It is just that on The Runaway, that sound is proving elusive, there one minute, so far way the next.
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