Even fatties have their moment in the sun and those lardy, enchanting London-based digits-four from Ealing, London, The Magic Numbers have clearly earned it with that tremendously bouncy and addictive slice of pop that is their ‘Forever Lost’ single – cross-pollinated from the earnest fragile vocals of Wayne Coyne and Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, the jingly-jangly buoyancy of the Lemonheads and a shot of California sunshine. And there you were thinking the achievements of fatties amounted to little more than making ideal stooges, scapegoats, dogsbodies, and broad-spectrum figures of fun.
Based around the sprightly songwriting skills and delicate vocal loveliness of the Trinidad-born former New Yorker, Romeo Stodart and his sister Michele plus a couple of other chubsters, the Magic Numbers munch their way through a dozen or so tracks of laid-back, sixties-oriented indie-pop, practising the kind of pared-down, wash-board skiffle approach of folks as varied as The Libertines (‘Long Legs’, ‘Love Me Like You’) and Bob Dylan (‘Wheels On Fire’). The band even manage to pay homage to the mellower, traditional tunesmithery of Burt Bacharach on the gorgeous, ‘I See You, I See Me’ and languid toe-shuffler, ‘Love’s A Game’.
The sisterly vocals may be more Deacon Blue than Mamas and the Papas on occasions but the boys and girls manage to steal themselves away from their Danish pastries to rustle up something equally tasty on this strong but unassuming debut.