MagnaFUx-ing It Up

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 24, 2008 6:09PM

The first time we met MagnaFUx's singer, Matt Bessemer, was in college. One moment we were at a party, sitting on a couch, chatting up an attractive coed, and then the next moment we were suddenly underneath the now upside down couch we were sitting on. As we crawled out there was Bessemer, giggling and saying, "Yeah, that's kind of what I thought it would look like."

This same mix of childish curiosity and maniacal mayhem informs the sound of MagnaFux (previously known to oldsters as Ethyline, and to octogenarians as Sludgeworth). The group occupies musical territory that's all their own, unabashedly poppy and punky -- without bearing any resemblance to mall punk, by the way -- and the mixture is strangely timeless. Their self-titled debut album could have come out in 1988, 1998, 2008, or 2018. Opening track "Better Days" sounds like vintage Naked Raygun, right down to the buzzsaw guitar and the chorus of "whoooaaaas" peppered throughout. The group's lyrics are decidedly un-PC (in a refreshing way) and the songs deal with love in a perspective rarely seen in pop; the narrator is sending his exes kiss-offs instead of miss-you missives.

Through it all, though, the group writes music that's lifting and life-affirming, informed by the spirit of punk days past, when bands wrote their own twisted pop and refashioned it to fit their purposes. This ethic carries on throughout the length of the album allowing screeds like "She Lies" and "Glass Gone" to sit comfortably alongside the inspirational "Lift Me Up." It's this tuneful dichotomy that sets MagnaFUx apart form the rest of the pack and makes them a hell of a lot of fun to listen to.