Somewhere in the search engine results for “magnolia,” there is one of many paintings titled exactly that. It’s just a JPG of the original by Martin Johnson Heade, but thanks to the click-to-zoom functionality on slam.org, you can get close enough to see the wrinkles in the white paint. The digital placard is also doing its best to describe the “voluptuous blossoms.” Any hint of horniness, however, doesn’t translate through the screen.
Mr. Softheart opens their debut album, Magdalene In Crisis (released Dec. 22, 2023), with a song that shares the name of the JPG of the painting of the flower. But their “Magnolia” is headed in the other direction, working in retrograde from the webpage, turning pixels into oil paints. “The rubber factory down the street is improving its cyber security,” sings the Softhearts’ frontman, Nick Fisher, a curator paid by the hour, before continuing: “I, too, had dreams.”
The whole song has a twinkle to it, like rain made from milk, each droplet designed to be captured on a CinemaScope canvas — but still able to burst against skin. To render such dimensionality throughout the album, the band worked with producer Seth Luloff, who ended up feeding sounds back through some of the same metal, transformers, etc. that the Beatles used to record Revolver at EMI Studios in the 1960s.
The effect of that analog circuitry is hot. Felt. Even MIDI files are made flesh and blood, like on lead single “Caravaggio,” when Nick speaks to himself through the void of a microKORG vocoder. He has an actor’s knack for enunciation — just listen to what he does with the word “undulates” — but here his delivery decays into something as ephemeral as a ghost at a house party.
Behind the album’s references to the splatter and screams of Italian Baroque paintings are serrated riffs and stabs of synth drenched in the very red Karo syrup of Italian slasher movies. John Fisher and Charlie Patterson, both part-time guitarists/part-time synth players in the strange three-piece lineup, are so eerily in step that each song becomes something of a whodunnit. You can never be sure whose black-gloved hands should be held responsible.
That’s not to say they’re out to draw blood. Once one of these catchy shrieks makes its way inside, it’ll simply stay awhile, flowing from appendage to appendage for days on end. Like, say, the jackbooted loop of a lick on “Bon Vivant” that carves out a kind of gothy garage rock next to the stimulant of a synth line — splitting the difference between “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop and “Tick” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
But it’s the threat of “State Trooper” that’s almost too real. For their cover, the Softhearts move the setting of the song a couple hundred miles east from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska to a sopping-wet stretch of highway like the one in Denis Johnson’s short story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” And though you can hear the narrator going nowhere fast, you can’t help but hit the gas yourself.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2024 issue.
