Magazine - No Thyself

Listening to the fifth Magazine album makes for a rather strange experience. It is akin to finding some long lost treasure, or something that has recently been exhumed from the deep, dark recesses of 1981. The band’s first album in exactly 30 years, ‘No Thyself’ finds Howard Devoto and co. on typically idiosyncratic and contrary form.

Despite the death of pioneering guitarist John McGeoch in 2004, Magazine reconvened in 2009 with the remaining members of the original line up plus guitarist Noko who played in Howard Devoto’s short lived Luxuria project. Bassist Barry Adamson is absent for this album due to film commitments, but all the hallmarks of Magazine in their prime can be heard.

Dave Formula’s trademark swooping and swirling keyboards are in place and Noko seems to have done a perfect job in replicating McGeoch’s powerful but inventive guitar style. There are two types of songs on ‘No Thyself’: the strong and strident post-punk guitar attack of opener ‘Do The Meaning’ and the intense ‘Holy Dotage’, and the more florid, baroque styling’s of ‘The Worst Of Progress’ and ‘Of Course Howard (1979)’ which indulge in Magazines’ long held prog-ish impulses. It is the urgent punk guitar tracks that are by far the most effective, however.

Devoto’s cryptic, darkly amusing and acerbic lyrics were always the focal point of Magazine and they are just as memorable here. The album sees Devoto, who is approaching his 60th birthday, ruminating on the subjects of age and mortality. This manifests itself most clearly in the likes of ‘Hello Mister Curtis’ in which he addresses Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain and professes that he himself will die “Like Elvis on some God forsaken toilet.” In his typically humorous style he changes The Who’s famous line by ending the track sinisterly whispering “I hope I die before I get really old”

There are far too many eye catching and clever lyrical couplets to mention, but ‘The Worst Of Progress’ holds a fantastic opening line: “I was out probing the weakness in society.” ‘Other Thematic Material’ meanwhile, shows that Devoto still has the power to shock with its explicitly graphic tale of sexual perversion, which even features the line “Spread your pussy” in amongst various other seedy references. It is all deeply sinister, but at the same time undoubtedly compelling.

Despite most of ‘No Thyself’ sounding just like the Magazine of old, album highlight ‘Physics’ does mark out new territory for the group. A lovely twinkling piano and soulful Hammond organ accompanies Devoto as he sweetly croons “Religion, it wasn’t meant for everyone.”

‘No Thyself’ does not, unfortunately, live up to the exalted heights of the band’s debut ‘Real Life’, but it is more than a worthy addition to their cannon and is far better than anyone could have expected after 30 years in the wilderness. Let’s hope this is a fresh beginning rather than one last hurrah.