Magic Touch

Description

With Magic Touch, the mysterious Jack Name presents a third album with a rawer production, revealing a new facet of the Los Angeles musician. In an era marked by alienation, the album offers the comfort of contact. Although Magic Touch is just as complex as his previous albums, Light Show (2014) and Weird Moons (2015), Jack Name sets aside the dense production of his earlier works to create a personal, simply natural album. These elements are evident in "Karolina," the dreamy and romantic first single. Jack Name is an enigmatic yet essential figure in the Los Angeles underground scene who has produced recordings for Cass McCombs, collaborated with Ariel Pink, and been covered by U.S. Girls and White Fence. With Magic Touch, he distances the lyrical and conceptual aspects from the dreamlike worlds of his first two albums and returns to Earth. It’s a simpler place, at least on the surface, where humans fall in love and argue, struggling with loneliness, seeking connections with others, and, for better or worse, becoming attached to one another. The almost subliminal narrative thread of Magic Touch reminds us that touch itself is magical. Recorded primarily in Jack Name's Hollywood apartment on a 24-track Radar, even the production is an intimate affair, with a bright crystalline aesthetic—almost as if the band is playing these songs inside your head. And while the instrumentation is sparse, the theme of human contact is present repeatedly through the tactile nature of the music, whether it’s Chris Cohen’s delicate drumming on "Dudette," Izella Berman’s fragile voice on "Empty Nights," or the elegant electric piano and clavinet played by Kenny Gilmore and Will Canzoneri throughout the album. There are no synths, no effects. With nothing more than stripped-down music and unadorned language, Magic Touch casts a spell to invoke the true magic of human connections.