Seek Magic

If you're the sort of person who can see music--even if you can't, perhaps--this is so colourful.

Having greedily sucked the Tapes blog dry of every note I could find without so much as a by your leave to the chap generous enough to share his creations with a bunch of strangers, I waited for Seek Magic's release tingling like a tuning fork and hoping he wouldn't pull a Big Pink on me. He didn't. Seek Magic is probably my favourite album of the year.

This is yet another one of those records about escapism, yearning for a bolt of light in the dark, an end to normality. And it finds it, to almighty effect; producing the kind of rapturous charge that no bedroom-dance record has ever assembled before.

It’s music that will soundtrack those peculiar moments where you really pay attention, free of distractions. This is music to spend time with and worth making time for.

Bicycle begins with an infectious melancholy hook, opens up with a perfectly placed vocal line steeped in regret and ends with Peter Hook-inspired guitars over a choir. Breathtaking stuff.

A record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach.

He may have followed the aspiring bedroom producer's now-established route from blog favourite to remixer (for Yeah Yeah Yeahs), but the solo debut of Dayve Hawk, former frontman for post-punks Hail Social, is anything but predictable. [Jan 2010, p. 122]