- Freo four-piece Demon Days are boosting the upsurge of neo-soul going on right now. After a clutch of singles and, really, not very long after forming (early in 2017), the quartet are throwing their debut EP out there. Warmly moody downtempo grooves are their stock in trade, but also a jumping off point for divergences in their sound.
You’ll hear them doing that Erykah Badu thing on opener, Daria’s Smile, courtesy of Bella Nichols’ low and ever-so-slightly smokey vocals. A bit of a political manifesto, Demon Days go super-conscious straight out of the gate. “We are all scared because we’re told to compete / Told to compete for a male gaze / But I’d rather stand and make my own plan / Than wait around for a man to take my hand.” Daria would approve, she might even smile. The political lessons don’t derail the slow funk -in case you were worried- and anyway, most of Magic Eye isn’t out to lecture its listeners.
It will change things up, at least a little, as you’ll soon find out on Disco Baby, which slips into a sequined jumpsuit and straps on synth and heads for the disco, circa 1982, when the dancefloor went electronic; GL would approve. Interestingly Demon Days flip the sound of the synth in the bridge for a solo on the keys and a much more jazzy feel, almost like a lifeline back to their core style. The rhodes effects a similarly jazzy transformation on the EP’s un-title track, I Can’t See Magic Eyes, which would otherwise be purely instrumental hip hop, with a very relaxing, wonky bass. It could only be improved with a guest appearance by Madlib, but we can’t have everything we want.
I get the feeling that the line “Moths fly and socks die” was just too good not to use, but it is so hilariously silly that pairing it with the rest of Moths, a rather po-faced song about enduring love “you and I, we survive,” is a bit of an ask. The slow, yearning funk is still pretty good, so, if you don’t think about it you‘ll be right.
If you haven’t clocked the whole Magic Eye thing yet, it’s a reference to those (‘90’s) so-called picture books full of fuzzy images that you stared at until you got a headache and a nose-bleed and could finally see a hidden 3D image (maybe). Here it’s a metaphor for the music and the multiple layers that reward listeners who spend the time. Neo-soul has so many constituent sounds that go into forming what it is (soul, jazz, hip hop, funk) that makes perfect sense. For Demon Days too, I can always feel different styles duelling for supremacy in any given song, or suddenly leaping out to surprise me. Take Highway for instance, which I swear just wants to flip out of a slow funk and into blue-eyed soul (it’s the honky-tonk piano); maybe if I give it a few more minutes it will.
The stylistic diversity is one of the things I like best about the band and, as good as they are at Erykah Badu impersonations, I’d like to hear even more of the things they're capable of, I’m just greedy though. Whatever my personal preferences Magic Eye is a bravura debut EP and it will reward all the time you spend with it.
- Chris Cobcroft.