Magic! Magic Roses are a trio from San Francisco that make a dreamy folk music. Their second album, Valley, is a Kickstarter success story with 99 people surpassing the $5000 target (according to the Kickstarter page anyway) back in late 2011. I’m glad they made it.
The album is a beautiful one. The sound (prehaps aided by the meadow artwork) evokes a summer wilderness. Not a harsh desert or tropical forest, but rather a sweeping landscape of sepiatone hills and fragrant grasses. For the ‘dream folk’ label, the vocals are very clear and I think it’s fair to say the driving force of each song. The result is somewhere along the lines of First Aid Kit, Sharon van Etten, and Mountain Man if they were based somewhere in the past; luscious voices crooned over smooth and gentle tracks that meander by like childhood summers (in the track ‘New Love’ they even proclaim ’Summer drags on, these sunsets keep on coming’).
Valley is an album of escapism, a record that allows you to slip out of whatever grey scenery that surrounds you and into a world of golden sunshine and gentle winds. There is a sense of sadness here too, as if both you and they know that such a time and place is hard to find and all too fleeting when you do.
You can buy the album on Bandcamp and the single ‘Valley’ is available for free. be sure to check out their debut album The Living Room from which the video below is taken.
West from Magic! Magic Roses on Vimeo.