As its name might suggest, Magnet School caused some solid attraction with its initial recordings, which included its 2007 full-length Tonight We Drink … Tomorrow We Battle the Evil at Hand. Mixing big sounding, open chord rock and sonic melodies that recall the days of Swervedriver or other bands across the sea, Magnet School actually hails from this side of the ocean—closer actually to the Colorado River in Texas.
The quartet with roots in Oklahoma and Colorado has been a part of the Austin scene for two decades now, playing in bands like Experimental Aircraft, Coco Candissi, and Schatzi before they formed with the single-minded goal to make a big melodic guitar band along the lines of Shiner or …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, both for whom they’ve opened.
Google “Magnet School band” though, and you’ll get cheese amateur performance videos from a hundred magnet school bands, often marching on their football fields. The Vinyl District is pleased, therefore, to ease your search in premiering the newest track from the band in question.
The sophomore album from which it’s taken, The Art of Telling the Truth, five years in the making, won’t be out until early next year on Shifting Sounds (home of Black Books and Gentlemen Rogues) as well as Sunshine HQ (home of their heroes My Bloody Valentine).
But here’s an exclusive premiere of the single, “British Monuments,” in a video packed with old stock footage of twirling dollies, obsolete rooms of IBM computers, forest fires, bygone cityscapes, and old steam trains. Soon everything is going backward: mushrooms tucking back into the ground, racehorses running in reverse, soldiers in Vietnam sucking up napalm rather than shooting it out, and planes jetting backwards across the skies, scooping their own chemtrails in a manner that would please Kylie Jenner.
The hardworking band is seen almost abstractly sawing away in super high contrast until they slowly come to focus as the music intensifies in the Craig Knapp-directed clip—its shards of dueling guitars by Michael J. Wane and Mark Ford in tight interplay as bassist Brandon Tucker and drummer Erik Conn bash it out in a way that can’t be ignored.
The single comes out October 9, the day they start a tour that commences in Dallas and blows like an urgent tumbleweed to Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania on the way to mid-month CMJ shows in Brooklyn. Be on time when School opens.
