Magic Dirt
Roky's Room

Roky’s Room won’t get played on Triple J. Actually, it’ll have trouble getting played anywhere except perhaps the graveyard shift at community radio. There are no voices, no drums and no bass either by the sounds of it. All that vacant space is filled with lots and lots of guitars. Magic Dirt have gone and made a noise album; in the process putting themselves as far from their yoof-courting, pop-rock salad days as they possibly could. But who will care for to a noise album from Magic Dirt? A good question - answered in part by Beast, a follow up mini-album that's presumably a less difficult (read: commercially viable) experience.

Roky’s Room is no guitar orchestra like Glen Branca’s early 80s symphonies, or Sonic Youth of old. This is cathartic perversion; cleansing by way of cacophony, a celebration of deformity with distortion pedals. It’s entirely possible its 38 minutes were pulled from one lenghy take. The 11 tracks are indexed in roughly three to four minute groups with many of the numbered ‘pieces’ indistinguishable from each other. The first section sounds like Godzilla repeatedly forcing a 747 through a giant meat grinder while the second maps an apocalyptic wasteland. Whether the title is an interpretation of Roky Erickson’s battle with the gremlins inhabiting his fractured mind is debatable. In the end it hardly matters. Whatever Roky’s Room will be interpreted as – sonic bliss or a pile of indecipherable garbage – it’s doubtful Magic Dirt could have made a gutsier move and for that alone they emerge with their integrity intact.

by Troy D Colvin