10th September 2005
Magic Dirt
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“Adalita's always going ‘Hey, can you hear that?'” says Magic Dirt bassist Dean Turner, “but it's only in her head.”

The key to musical progress is hearing things that aren't there. Melodies unsung, harmonies implied. Latent vibrations, unspoken ideas, and finally the mysterious phantom sounds swirling above and beyond them all.

Tuning in and making manifest this nebulous shadow world is the creative musician's journey. Welcome to sonic alchemy of Magic Dirt's fifth album, a magnificent, super-melodic collision of sound and instinct called SNOW WHITE.

This extraordinary record is the culmination of a 13-year quest through a maelstrom of amplified sound to some of the most tight and thrilling radio rock'n'roll of our time. Its rich melodies and lavish, seductive atmospheres comprise a new benchmark of perfection for one of our most driven and uncompromising bands.

“With the last album (2003's Tough Love), we were looking at being solid and concise and stripped back,” says bassist Dean Turner. “We've done that now. This time we wanted the textures to be really lush, fleshy and layered. Beautiful.”

“We wanted to jam it out and see were the art led us, rather than where we led the art,” adds Raul. And he's not surprised that this process has resulted in some of his band's most gorgeous and accessible songs ever. “That's the discipline of making five records,” he shrugs.

“The process was absolutely meandering and absolutely focused,” clarifies singer Adalita, perfectly aware of the Zen-like contradiction. “It was this weird situation where we didn't know where we were going, but we trusted our guts totally.”

SNOW WHITE's bearings range from 19 th century choral symphonies to 20 th century film soundtracks to the latest albums by Bjork, Nick Cave and theredsunband. Its immense wall of sound – one song comprises 94 tracks – combines the talents of long-term Dirt producer Lindsay Gravina and American mix engineer David Bianco (Teenage Fanclub, The Posies).

But the seeds of the album were sown in the apparently boundless ether between Adalita's imagination and her increasingly exceptional vocal cords.

“When I was tracking the demos I started to enjoy layering my voice,” she says. “I'm getting more interested in instrumental songs, the power of music without words. The voice can sound really beautiful alone, just the texture of it. When you start to layer it, you hear incredible things.

“Lindsay's fantastic with harmonies, he's classically trained so I relied on him a lot. But then I was always hearing weirder harmonies, phantom sounds. So there was a lot of running, going ‘Quick, turn the mic on! I've got another idea!”

"We wanted this record to be vocally driven" ,” says Dean. “And David was a big factor in getting the record to sound so different to the last one. We were really conscious of having a depth to the sound that you could really sink your teeth into.”

“We did a lot of backup tracks,” says Raul. “For example, a guitar would have three microphones on it – and David used everything in the mix. It was outrageous. He put everything in, so it sounds huge: five tracks of bass, up to 15 guitars, easily 20 vocals on some tracks.”

Magic Dirt's hard-wired passion for experimentation manifests in other, equally unpredictable ways on SNOW WHITE. The simple act of picking up an acoustic guitar, for example, had been forbidden until the perversely euphoric rush of “Envious” demanded otherwise. And the sunny country feel of “I Love The Rain” was an act of treason that couldn't be denied.

“Those are probably the most challenging songs we've done,” says Raul, “simply because none of us are used to playing slow and soft and without tons of distortion. It really pushed us to try and make those songs work. They were the hardest to record.”

“You get to a point,” says Dean, “where the most fun rules to break are your own. The enemy is your comfort zone. Adam (Robertson) pushed himself really hard to come up with challenging beats, as we all did with our instruments. The challenge was to go somewhere we hadn't been.”

The anarchy is naturally balanced by more recognisable Magic Dirt motifs. Check the brutally distorted riffs driving the first single, “Locket”, for starters, or the barrage of multi-textured guitars sculpted into the euphoric waves of “Feel Like A Demon” and “Sleep”; and more subtly in the elegant closing track, “Tiger Eyes”.

The foot-tapping pop of “Grab Your Hair” is busted in two by one of Raul's most incendiary improvisations on record. “Mother's Latest Fear” is a classic Dirt freak-out, building from a slightly disquieting, hypnotic spiral into a full-blown terror trip driven by the nameless anxieties of modern life.

But from splashes of sunny ‘50s girl group innocence to an occasional unhinged falsetto redolent of Kate Bush, it's the ever-broadening scope of Magic Dirt's canvas that makes SNOW WHITE one of the most startlingly unique and plain lovable albums of 2005.