Tim Cohen pulls another rabbit from hat

My review of the new-ish Magic Trick album, River of Souls is up today at the Dusted Tumblr, which just passed its 100th post.

I said, "Both in his Fresh & Onlys project and here in the solo-thing-that-grew called Magic Trick, Tim Cohen has been moving gradually towards clarity, shrugging off the iridescent fuzz of Grey Eyed Girls and the home-taped indefiniteness of his first solo album to move into focus. Here in the follow up to 2012’s Ruler of the Night, Cohen continues to make his sound more legible than ever, while retaining the easy-going, transcendental mysticism that has always made his songs so charming.

"Cohen recorded River of Souls at his own Tree House studio with Phil Manley. Manley is a master of clean, uncluttered recording. His own band, The Fucking Champs, makes albums so sharply accurate you could cut your finger on them; they’re like metal albums sterilized for the operating theater. Yet while the two of them have cleared pretty much all the fuzz, allowing you to hear and separate layers of sound, Cohen maintains a certain soft and gentle feel. River of Souls is a precise rendering of laid-back ideas, one where you can hear every background vocal, every bass line, every slap and shiver of tambourine, without losing the general sense of hippie well-being."


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This is the one that reminds me of Sam & Dave.


The snow mostly missed us this time (sorry NYC), but damn, it's cold. I got out about a quarter of a mile to the main road this morning and decided that I would get frost-bite if I did my normal run. So I headed the other way, which goes through more woods and less open fields, and actually, it was pretty stunning, bright sun, white snow, blue sky and the sound of trees shifting in the wind. I had that wind at my back all the way back, up the big hill, and it was like a physical presence pushing from behind. Anyway, beautiful run, glad I did it, no sign of lingering damage. (From the wind or the big hill, which I've been avoiding because of my hip.) Bill and I used to always call that run the "Ireland run" because it's got some very pretty, wild looking hills where cows graze and in the summer it gets very green...haven't done it in probably a year.

Also, we're seeing Damien Jurado tonight. More about that later.