Klima Serenades & Serinettes. I am not much for Piano Magic. Everyone everywhere makes allegations over their loveliness, tendency toward beguilement, etc...I found it all a bit dull. Klima is in Piano Magic. She sings, probably not enough. The first song here is a Piano Magic cover by someone in Piano Magic. I don't know whether it was she who sang it in Piano Magic. It's a lovely song. Is it as lovely when dressed in Piano Magic? Unknown. Even here it is metered and stutter stepped but not to any detriment. It's a terrific opening number. Intrigue and 'Peter the Painter' drama played out as if in a cinema. I listened to the radio today and on the air was a university professor or philosophy and he moving recounted the greatest moments and missteps of many of the great thinkers and statesmen of the west and he seemed most pleased with Winston Churchill. Not FE Smith. They did not mention the siege at Sydney Street. Second track, By Your SIde, another dark, spare track. Piano Magic write historical lyrics don't they? The one about rifles is meant to be about WWI. I've just recently finished Storm of Steel and it is amazing. How do you tell a wound is not so bad? His brains are not streaming down his face. It is an odd thing though, apparently rewritten 8 times?! Has Ernst Junger written anything else worth reading? ANd really divorced from the realism it is essentially a diary of his time in Hell although he seems quite jolly all the way through. I doubt Piano Magic took as their inspiration Storm of Steel as that book is vivid and exciting and well they are, as mentioned previously, dull. Klima doesn't write historical lyrics though as an english as a second language person the lyrics are something clever. Naughty bits about cutting people up, storing them in jars and keeping them beside you. Charming, really. Maybe if Piano Magic had simply adapted a Barbara Tuchmann novel to music they would capture lightning in a bottle. Much of this record, Klima's second, is dark and minimalist seeming. On By My Side it is multi-tracked synth pipes? Perhaps they are real. Call me William Prynne, my ears are shabby. A sever impediment for certain when writing about "music". I could take part in the fashion of the day and spread spurious rumours, speculate wildly, play my role as Matthew Hopkins and proclaim Klima as a witch and be immortalized as a villain for time eternal even as I might die before my 30th birthday. I've been writing a great deal of popular history, my new friends are Diana Manners and Rainsborough and the phossy jaw girls and the aforementioned Peter the Painter. Klima's lyrics are not bad but it's the same old vague wannabe enchanting mediocrity saved only by her inherent loveliness. Whispers and gentle plucks and trills and prettiness. Third song has passed, similar to the first two. Now a wordless bit of comeliness. She takes brilliant photographs and as such I could love her, I am certain, I could marry her and follow her around the world and play the musical box and haunt her diminutive shadows and protect her from the would be Matthew Hopkins and prevent her from having her skull removed and placed ina freezer as the tragic fates could not forfend as witnessed by the tragic tales of today's Arizona. This is not of the southwest, it is wintry though, and outside the winter has taken hold, seven inches of snow being transformed as I type, the ephemeral air the freighted cold compressing the snow into a magnificent lattice which will crunch with the sound of warmth forlorn. This song is a bit nice, very nice, a bit more urgent than the first four tracks. Now to song 6. It is time for the ILX poll for best albums of the year. I nominated this album, I predict ero votes. I really don't like that place. In some corners there are people who are begging for someone to convince them that they really should enjoy something that they do not enjoy. Is this possible ? I could be convinced that there is a loose objective standard on what delineates good music from poor music but there is no adjoining standard when it comes to emotional attachment to music. Why would I propose marriage to Klima and not to Esben the Witch? I don't know. This song, this winter drawn clear, I find delightful when earlier I was cringing while listening to Esben the Witch's new album. FE Smith would not be an Esben the Witch fan. I bet they will be huge and will win the album of the year on ILX some year soon. Things Get Better With Time now and I prefer it when the man is not singing but this is the weakest track on the album. The track where she decided or someone mentioned that it was all a bit mopey right? So she's "rocking" out, and some dude was walking past the studio and was roped in for some on call dreariness. Oh dear. The first album didn't have a boring dude on it. He's probably got a PHD in dreary, a member of the over credentialed class without any skills for anything other than writing record reviews for websites and government work. He could train Mossad's secret agent vultures and sharks with just another year or two in university with David Gilmour's son. When I was in Myrtle Beach I marveled at the beautiful Turkey Vultures that migrated from the gulf course to the warmth of buildings and houses when the snow fell. We don't have turkey vultures here. I don't believe. I should look up the range of Turkey Vultures but their ugliness reminds me of my car and I think I love my car. Sylvia now and back to the gentle balladry with the stuttered percussion. We do miss Guy Fixsen, slightly. Possibly we miss Alan Moulder as well. Wouldn't he be brilliant with Klima? Yes. Now to the "jam". A bit of Math rock verbalizing. I am currently reading Euclid and his Modern Rivals and have decided that should I fail in my endeavour to write a best selling novel(already accomplished) then I want to be Lewis Carrol or at the least Charles Dodgson and write a witty defense of someone important and uninspiring to the youth of today. Euclid used to mean something to gentlemen who craved dignity and respect. What is Eculid's standing today? Much diminished, certainly. I could write an allegorical defense of Lysander Spooner. The ghost of a social anarchist returned to defend himself against usurpation by the likes of Glenn Beck. It would be brilliant, I could insert a superfluous bit of erotica between Lysander and Joan of Arc in greek to appear learned and wise. I am neither. This track is a bit meandering but I don't mind. It is the twinkles, combined with the compressed snow under foot and sun it turns to fairy dust. Hopefully she doesn't marry John McEntire instead and then deliver a third album filled only with noodly math rock instrumentals. last track, more softness, more slowness, more quietness, words concerning the sea, blackness, the depths of human emotion in seven not profound clauses. It's lovely, really, it's a plaid dress and a bob haircut and a tender strum of the guitar that caresses my inner existence.