Anthony Snape


MAGIC DIRT  
Official Site
www.magicdirt.net
 
“Adalita’s always going ‘Hey, can you hear that?’” says Magic Dirt bassist Dean Turner, “but it’s only in her head.”
 
The key to musical progress is hearing things that aren’t there. Melodies unsung, harmonies implied. Latent vibrations, unspoken ideas, and finally the mysterious phantom sounds swirling above and beyond them all.
 
Tuning in and making manifest this nebulous shadow world is the creative musician’s journey. Welcome to sonic alchemy of Magic Dirt’s fifth album, a magnificent, super-melodic collision of sound and instinct called SNOW WHITE.
 

This extraordinary record is the culmination of a 13-year quest through a maelstrom of amplified sound to some of the most tight and thrilling radio rock’n’roll of our time. Its rich melodies and lavish, seductive atmospheres comprise a new benchmark of perfection for one of our most driven and uncompromising bands.


“With the last album (2003’s Tough Love), we were looking at being solid and concise and stripped back,” says bassist Dean Turner. “We’ve done that now. This time we wanted the textures to be really lush, fleshy and layered. Beautiful.”


“We wanted to jam it out and see were the art led us, rather than where we led the art,” adds Raul. And he’s not surprised that this process has resulted in some of his band’s most gorgeous and accessible songs ever. “That’s the discipline of making five records,” he shrugs.


“The process was absolutely meandering and absolutely focused,” clarifies singer Adalita, perfectly aware of the Zen-like contradiction. “It was this weird situation where we didn’t know where we were going, but we trusted our guts totally.”
 
SNOW WHITE’s bearings range from 19th century choral symphonies to 20th century film soundtracks to the latest albums by Bjork, Nick Cave and theredsunband. Its immense wall of sound – one song comprises 94 tracks – combines the talents of long-term Dirt producer Lindsay Gravina and American mix engineer David Bianco (Teenage Fanclub, The Posies).
 
But the seeds of the album were sown in the apparently boundless ether between Adalita’s imagination and her increasingly exceptional vocal cords.