Drugstore
White Magic For Lovers

THE REVIEW

LIVING LIKE A SPACE GIRL
or the sound of white magic for lovers

Today I want to introduce you to what I believe is the most inspired and expressive CD from one of the most underrated and unknown indie-pop Anglo-Brazilian bands: Drugstore! Note that it came out in 1998 while Brit-pop was sending out its last gasps of pain into the ether...

It starts off with a bang with "Say Hello", an exceptional presentation of the band that greets with a magnificently electric, folk, and at times Mexican style all those who play the guitar, who believe in human life on Mars, who walk in the rain and who are convinced that an accordion weaving exceptional riffs together with an electric guitar can remove every trace of love despair from your eyes.
Skipping with both feet over the dog of "Mondo Cane" (the only barely impactful episode along with "I don't wanna be here without you"), here comes a Spanish guitar which, with the intrusion of a string quartet (in particular Ian Burdge’s cello), announces the arrival of "El President", the band's only "famous" single, also thanks to the very successful collaboration with Thom Yorke, who lends his most velvety and inspired voice. Poetry and electric melancholies introduce us to "Sober", while in "I Know I Could" the violin and electrified acoustic sing to us the despair and illusion of a girl with a dangling cigarette and a heart like an empty brandy glass about to fall off the kitchen table. But as we young men know, every girl soon regains her honor, her life, and her happiness, as Isabel Monteiro, singer-bassist of Drugstore, shows us in "Spacegirl", an orchestral, pounding glam anthem (at a precise point Mike Chylinski's snare drum does its job well), lively and furious.

It is only now that I recognize I have a concept album in my hands, in which a first "booming" side is followed by a low-fi one. "Never Come Down", sung by guitarist Daron Robinson, could be a sunny minor ballad by James from "Pisces Iscariot", while with "A Song For Pessoa" sweetness rains from the sky for those who dream of playing verses to a poet now gone... here is encapsulated all the harmony and confidence Isabel's voice can achieve, whispering to us a poetry vanished in the time of a night. In "White Magic For Lovers" the expressive capabilities of the entire band soar like precise and thin paper airplanes in the wind: this track clearly expresses the soul of the entire album, alternating calm and nocturnal moments with choruses where the sun of the "first weekend of May" pushes its rays over a hill... it seems a true magic unfolds where tears find peace only in water and secretly in our pocket we hold a lucky charm made from the hair of our love.
"Tips for travelling", the second track by Daron Robinson, is still melancholy in pumpkins style, made of black cats crossing abandoned streets of unknown towns. The group bids farewell with "The Funeral (But most of all)", a ceremony like the ancient ones, in which with an often boisterous and goliardic dirge Isabel self-celebrates an impossible future departure, with mounds of snow in July, a lot of money to have fun in the afterlife, fireworks, the sun saluting the moon, dozens of roses around the bed and all the ex-lovers telling heartbreaker stories, the same with which this fabulous and magical band has moved us.

PS (this PS is like the ghost track of the record, soft and just hinted): the artwork is truly remarkable, colorful with tempera, stars, glitter, patchwork, themed photos, and voodoo lover dolls (at the end of "Spacegirl" the singer ironically says she hates them). All this makes the product even more appealing and appreciable!

from "The Funeral (but most of all)":

"...but please put me somewhere near the sea
with one caring angel waiting for me
he'll be holding my heart in his hands
but most of all
i'd like to go with a friend"

5/5: Good job! One of the first albums I truly loved, I was still young, it was 1998 and Brit-pop was sending its last gasps of pain into the ether...