Here We Go Magic: "Tunnelvision"

The rise of Barack Obama is musical, not visual. Portraits of a face looking upwards to tomorrow will never quite capture it. The vagueness of his appeal is rather like that of a song: compelling and beautiful, but for reasons not altogether quantifiable. Here We Go Magic have taken the autumn of our hopes and compressed the gentler portion of its energy into a gleaming fist of enthusiasm.

“Tunnelvision” as a title is more apt than perhaps even Luke Temple knows, for his song never moves. It never crosses from point A to point B; never emerges from underground to see a wide horizon. Rather it circles the same spot over and over, like a compass. With each rotation the indentations get deeper and deeper, as Temple’s insistent percussion pounds quietly into the very backside of the mind.

“Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” is here washed clean, sped up, and made twice as cyclical. In the process “Tunnelvision” becomes lighter but less laid back than its predecessor, with Temple’s itchy trigger finger firing on as many vocal ideas as his considerable melodic mind can muster. The key achievement of this “stream-of-consciousness” approach is to hold the shifting movement of his whimsy in tension with the usual songwriter’s toolbox: chord, beat, hook. Like a Duck-Rabbit illusion for the ear, “Tunnelvision” appears alternately bizarre and approachable, but always consistent in mood. Thoughtful and upbeat, Temple’s unlikely anthem manifests the tepid enthusiasm of our times. And if there is a darker side to Temple’s vision let it come in deeper album cuts; for these four minutes I am content to look out my apartment window and think big.