Bandits on the Run released their new album, Rough Magic, on June 12th.
Rough Magic is the second full-length album release from the New York City-based trio consisting of Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn, and paints fourteen separate pictures of connection. Each track encompasses its own world, complete with distinct characters and emotions.
“Am I Your Mirror?” opens the album with lyrics and a folk guitar sound that captivates from the very first second.
The band’s vocals and lyrics such as, “You say you want to hear my truth / Well, I’m dying to hear it too / But I don’t know” and the repeating line “I want to come back to my body,” begin the album with a struggle between a long-term connection and the need to take care of yourself. The album also includes tracks surrounding feeling directionless and indecisive (”O My Soul” and “Lostlostlost”), and some that take on a more intense and almost hypnotizing tone (White Chapel, Red Light”), all of which are a tribute to an old folk style while telling timelessly universal stories.
The album’s third track, “Woods Alone at Night,” features a switching of the reigns of lead vocalist, an alternation which continues to occur throughout the album. The dark vocals here give the track a distinctive haunting quality, giving a performance true to the song’s setting with lines such as “Lost in the woods is no game… when it’s to find home or die.”
“Like a Clam,” in contrast, paints a picture of a very quietly-dealt-with struggle taking place in the small moments of the everyday: “I just wish you left the door alone/ But you slammed it like a storm that you’ve thrown.” The lyrics in this song set it apart as one of the album’s most impactful.
“Tilted Universe” is a previously unreleased gem from the album.
Energetic and chaotic, the track, with its casually profound lines like “Everything decays and changes as it goes,” is an amalgamation of all of the album’s high points.
“Song for Jon” takes on a more pop tone to give an ominous energy to a relationship that’s gone bad. Here, the band sings “Our history feels like fiction” and “You hate the way I’m always keeping score,” keeping up with the band’s tendency to write striking lyrics in every track.
“The Bell Rang” is one of the album’s more somber tracks, utterly gut-wrenching in its delivery.
Using deeper instrumentals and the implied sound of its title to signal the end of a connection, fading and growing apart. The album’s title track and recent single “Rough Magic” is a classic acoustic track with lyrics that reassure that no matter the struggle, life always has the capability to bring itself back up: “It takes time to live the life you want to know / Take your time /you see it better when it’s slow.”
“Love Pass Through” is the last full-length track on the album. Serenely harmonic and lyrically tranquil, “Love Pass Through” moves the album forward into a sense of surety.
Throughout the record, three songs act as bookends to its emotional heights: the album’s shortest tracks, “May This Love (Cassette)” and “May This Love (Party” are barely three-minute tracks which feature fuzzy recordings of simplistic love songs to reset the album’s emotional baseline as something pleasant and worth the struggles. “May This Love (Deux Chevaux)” closes the album on a note of hope for a love yet to come.
Rough Magic is available to stream everywhere now. The album also kicks off a US tour running until the end of October.
