@apartofhim's Top 20 of 2014 - #10 Mrs. Magician "Strange Heaven"

This is why I listen to lo-fi garage rock. Call me pretentious, call me a music snob, but this album is almost perfect. It probably should be much higher on my list... But we'll leave it here for now. This is what PopMatters' Zachary Houle had to say about the album:

All in all, does Strange Heaven reinvent the wheel? No, it does not. However, is it an album with catchy hooks and paisley coloured hues? Yes. Yes, it is. With Strange Heaven, Mrs. Magician simply writes all killer and no filler, keeping things to a brief, just-barely-over-30-minutes runtime; as a result, the album feels remarkably whole. Their sound might be rooted in genres and times in the distant past, but they write engrossing and invigorating songs that light up the retro-garage scene and seem less sentimental than honest and reverential. There’s a little bit of fuzziness to these songs, but they’re not so gauzy that they aren’t clean and refreshing; they bridge the gap between the sonics of the ‘60s and the production values of modern indie-rock. All of these songs, despite the occasional profanity and skewed lyrical content, could have come out of surf rock’s heyday, and possibly could have been bona fide hits. Read the rest of his view at PopMatters.