Magic Dirt - I Love TheRain

Tue 31st Jan, 2006 in Music Reviews

There’s something to be said for finding a niche market, a defining sound, and sticking to it. Most music fans can probably name any number of bands whose records all have one certain sound, and good luck to them. Every now and then, however, certain bands play around with their sound, experimenting with something new. On Magic Dirt’s new single I Love The Rain, they’ve put down the wailing electric guitars, taken the foot off the accelerator, and produced a sickly sweet ballad. And while the results may be reasonable, is this really what we want, or need, from Magic Dirt?

I Love The Rain opens with a soft acoustic guitar with a light xylophone accompaniment, as Adalita’s unrecognisable vocals drift over the top of it. There’s something distinctly unsettling about Adalita being nice and sickly sweet, singing about love, as though her many years as a rock and roll vixen had never happened. Even when the electric guitars provide the bridge, it’s just not the same.

Elsewhere on this single release, Something To Care About is a similar low key number, although the acoustic guitar seems to have been swapped for a slide which never quite gets used to full effect. Bone Dry is another soft song, with more slide, and by this stage its hard to imagine Magic Dirt are one of Australia’s premier loud rock bands. Fortunately, closer Johnny And Sarah brings back the old Dirt, ripping through a noisy riff like a kick to the guts.

I Love The Rain’s four songs are never boring, and they’re not bad songs, but there’s plenty of places where listeners can go for sickly sweet pop love songs, and Magic Dirt would probably be better served sticking to what they’re good at; rock and roll, hard and fast, all the time.