“It’s hard to stay in your room,” Luke Temple sings on last LP A Di fferent Ship. What a perfect status update, that lyric, for Here We Go Magic, the little engine that could knock the socks o ff Radiohead, so much that Thom Yorke declared it the best band at Glastonbury 2010 and Nigel Godrich hopped aboard. No, hyperactive magicians, a bedroom could never hold you.
But it might always define them. Forget how polished their sound got—and with Godrich bu ffng the boards, it positively shined—there was always the reflection of one guy, a pair of Sennheisers and a dimmer switch. Be Small connotes acceptance of the intimacy Temple can’t seem to breach: “Stella” sets a benchmark for the band’s soft-crush synth grooves, and the triumvirate of “Girls In The Early Morning,” “Tokyo London US Korea” and “Ordinary Feeling” make like Air making like Meddle-era Pink Floyd.
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
