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Magnet On Your Side
Filter US
Over the past few weeks I have had a love/hate relationship with Magnet’s On Your Side, which has just seen release stateside on Filter Magazine’s newly formed record label, Filter US Recordings. Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Even Johansen, aka Magnet, hails from Bergen, Norway, supposedly the rainiest city in Europe. Johansen is a superb musician with a pleasing voice who also knows his way around a studio. Never before have I heard so much ear candy on one album. Harps, horns, glockenspiel, string quartets and Theremins all compete to occupy a space beside the more traditional guitar, bass, and drums set-up. The first track, “Everything’s Perfect,” is a bittersweet song which utilizes a wide variety of instruments, all played by Johansen himself. It’s an impressive start to an album that has been widely praised in Europe, and I was looking forward to spending some time with it.
Track listing:
01 Everything's Perfect
02 Last Day Of Summer
03 Where Happiness Lives
04 On Your Side
05 The Day We Left Town
06 Nothing Hurts Now
07 Lay Lady Lay- with Gemma Hayes
08 Overjoyed
09 I'll Come Along
10 My Darling Curse
11 Smile To The World
12 Chasing Dreams
13 Wish Me Well
14 Little Miss More Or Less
However, there’s a heavy-handedness to On Your Side that has a tendency to exhaust even the most dedicated of listeners, and Johansen could benefit from an outside producer to scale back his arrangements, which are more often than not overly busy and bordering on pretentious. One listen to Steve Albini’s production on Nina Nastasia’s “Dogs” and it becomes apparent how good an album On Your Side could have been with a better producer at the helm.
There are some lovely songs here, but many sound either excessively familiar or are just simply too derivative of other artists. This is my biggest problem with Johansen. He seems to be more of a musical stylist than a songwriter, and I get no sense of his personality or if he has anything to say that is his own. There’s a preciousness to many of the songs that begins to grate after a while, and the album relies too heavily on aping what has come before it musically to convey its meaning, which for all its busyness remains remarkably lightweight.
There’s a sameness to much of On Your Side that begins to wear thin midway through the album. A cover of Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” is the breaking point in many respects, as it adds nothing new to the song whatsoever. Johansen, in his most imitative moment on the album, even tries to mimic Dylan’s throaty vocal delivery of the original version. I believe Johansen needs either a producer or collaborator to push him into a place that is unknown and untested to try and ring something out of him that is 100% his own creation.
On Your Side would have been a good 5 song EP. Instead it meanders for roughly over an hour, becoming increasingly trite while showing occasional glimpses of what could have been a much more daring record. This is a bunt instead of a Grand Slam. Anyone have Steve Albini’s number?
