Magik and Isolation in 2020, by Kurt Gottschalk

Back in July, Magik Markers quietly released a four-song digital EP, the first new music they’ve put out in a half dozen years. It was subdued, a little psychedelic, with a title suggesting they’ve been out of our ugly loop for a while. (Magik Markers has always been good at naming). In October, the band followed Isolation From Exterior Time: 2020 with the more simply monikered full-length 2020, making the previous EP seem like a bridge between the new album and the 2011 cassette Isolation From Exterior Time.

2020 the album isn’t a statement but a culmination. It’s not like the Stooges setting signposts with “1969” and, subsequently, “1970.” The band members had drifted in different directions and away from music, and the new releases were recorded slowly, over several years. 2020 isn’t the point, it’s just the endpoint. But it’s also a culmination, at least for now, in sound. Magik Markers started operations as an enormously noisy improv rock band in Hartford, CT, almost 20 years ago, and became more contained as notice took hold. They shifted toward songcraft during their initial decade but aberrant sounds were always there, like a subway running underneath the cinema. They didn’t abandon noise, they just put more things on top of it.

On 2020, the pastiche is near perfection. The songs are crazy varied, suggesting at times southern rock, Black Sabbath or their early champions, Sonic Youth. Other times they’re drenched in reverb and stark surrealism. It’s a bit scattered, as can be expected from the conditions under which it was created, but it builds to a beautiful close in its final third. The sonic experiment of “Hymn for 2020” is a much needed anthem for separation and sorrow. It’s separated by a little, 45-second rockish twist called “Swole Sad Tic” from the broken pleas of “CD-Rom” and leading to the closing “Quarry (If You Dive)” distant and dissonant and sadly nostalgic and ending with ghostly bongos.

2020 the album isn’t a signpost for the year we’re in. The Markers have made it clear they live outside of time. But it sure feels like one, so who are they to say?