COMES WITH A SMILE
(UK)
2000

Piano Magic
Artists Rifles
(Rocket Girl)

Martin Williams

Largely dispensing with the spooky toytown ambience that has characterised them until now, Piano Magic's third album reverts to a more overall traditional sound, opening with one of three untitled instrumentals that punctuate the proceedings. Military drum reports are offset by muted tom tom thuds that replicate the sound of distant explosions, establishing a tone of tense expectancy and giving us the first formations of what might be sketched as a thread linking the songs on Artists' Rifles. With memorials to the anonymous dead of World War 1 adorning the cover, the record seems to parallel these innocents with today's bumfluff romantics who lack such dramatic mythology with which to martyr themselves. The opening instrumental fades to black and we bleed into the pounding Joy Division bass of the taut epic No Closure, it's hypnotic spoken narrative painting a picture of the persistence of memory onto a French landscape. It's about as robust as Piano Magic get. After the delicate siren song of A Return To The Sea, with it's enveloping vocals folding in on themselves and building to an enchanting refrain, the metallic clatter of the second untitled instrumental acts as a clarion call to invoke attention before the dreamlike You & John Are Birds. It's with empathy that the title track's narrator considers a photo of a war poet and concludes : "young men, as us." Not a lightening bolt revelation admittedly but one that's made more poignant the backing flow of spectral choir and Red House Painters snare rolls. Nothing is hammered home, with conclusions left to dangle, as the album's light touch and haunting mood builds a separate world. Indulgent, fascinating and as inscrutable as the young faces on those stone monuments.