This is the fourth album for Magic Castles on Anton Newcombe’s A Records, and Brian Jonestown Massacre certainly serves as a reference point for this jangle-psych outfit, whose freakbeat confections reference an idealized Nuggets-1960s vibe. The band’s leader and main consistent player, Jason Edmonds, has a way of threading fuzz-guitar musculature through hazy daydream auras that is much in line with Newcombe’s sidewinding work in “Anemone” or “Straight Up and Down.” The two bands toured together in 2014 and split an EP the same year, so it’s clear they see the affinity, too, though honestly, anyone would.
Magic Castles have been around since the late aughts, refining an expansive, cosmic garage rock sound that has grown clearer over time without making any radical departures. Sun Reign comes after a bit of a hiatus. After Starflower in 2015, Edmonds started writing these songs at home in Minneapolis after taking time off from touring as a new dad. The break extended after he was involved in a serious car accident in 2019, then just as he recovered, COVID hit and the George Floyd murder set off protests very near his recording studio. So, it’s been an eventful few years for the Magic Castles front man, even if it has resulted in only one 10-song album.
Perhaps as a result of the amount of time available for it, Sun Reign has a very finished, polished air. Its cloudy atmospheres of wistful melody hang beautifully in lucid sonic spaces. Its whip-sharp instrumental licks reverberate in precise, well-considered ways. The songs allow time for dreaming, but they don’t leave you drifting aimlessly. Unlike a lot of psychedelic garage rock—the solo work of Greg Ashley or the latest Aquarian Blood come to mind — it leaves no hanging ends or woozy dislocations.
Consider, for instance, how “Lost Dimension” comes together, out of gentle, trebly folk picking and whooshing sonics. Its whispery vocals gain steam as the song goes on, and delicate guitars blow up into monstrous, electrified size, but the song only expands, never loses its shape. Its pretty melody remains unperturbed, even as the volume swells. “World of Time” is shadowy and full of ominous textures, its washes of sound kept in order by the growl of bass, the steady pulse of drums. Again, the song is airy and dreamlike, drifting over in wistful, oceanic waves, but it is anything but undisciplined. The melody curves where it should, the crescendos come when they must and the song moves with purpose even at this slow, hallucinatory speed.
There’s one relatively obscure cover in “Ode to the Wind,” 1966 single by El Paso-based one-hitters Danny and the Counts. It’s a classic garage band twist of melancholy and bravado, eerie echoed with a fuzz guitar lick winding through it. Magic Castles’ version sticks pretty close to the original, with the minor key jangle erupting into a sinewy serpentine line, and a chorus of “la la la la las” pitched somewhere between euphoria and regret. And yet, maybe it’s a little cleaner and more lucid, and maybe it shines a clearer light through the rain of guitars. Magic Castles sound like the kind of lo-fi Nuggets 1960s you only imagined, just the same but more so.
