The Magic Numbers

by Stephen Thomas ErlewineEvery three years or so, the British music press touts another band as the Next Big Thing, or at least the antidote to the trend the press kick-started a couple years back. Some of these bands -- whether they're Suede, the Strokes, or Franz Ferdinand -- are quite good, even excellent, and sometimes they're merely average; it all depends on what trend the band's supposed to bring to end and what fad they're supposed to kick-start, since the quality of the music almost always takes a back seat to the demands of fashion. This kind of hyped-up transience is one of the great things about pop music -- not only is it supposed to exist in the moment, sometimes great pop music only sounds great within its given moment, whether it's Whigfield or Crazy Frog -- but that doesn't mean that the trends are always fun, and one of the more inexplicable British-driven fads of the 2000s is the Magic Numbers, whose eponymous debut album was hailed as an instant classic in many quarters upon its early-summer release in the U.K. in 2005. Comprised of two sets of brothers and sisters, the quartet sings soft, gentle sunshine pop with vaguely rootsy underpinnings. Because of this slightly folky bent and clear reverence for '60s pop, they were positioned as the return of the real as compared to the new wave of new wave, which encompassed anyone from Interpol to Franz, and even the neo-garage rock revival of the beginning of the decade -- after all, by the summer of 2005, it was clear that the White Stripes were too arty and obstinate to qualify as a roots band. ... Read More...