If you pick up a guitar, make it scream loudly. And well, scream loud. These two thoughts crossed Sheer Mag’s mind somewhere during their creation, especially by vocalist Christina Halladay and guitarist Matt Halder, 1/2 of the Philly band that emerged around ten years ago and has just released its third full-length, “Playing Favourites”. Yes, the first post-pandemic and also the first on Jack White’s Third Man Records. The punk spirit of the first EPs occupied the band’s imagination and shortly afterwards, on their first album, “Need To Feel Your Love” (2017), they discovered that they could fine-tune things with a very rock FM spirit.
The 1970s took over Sheer Mag’s music. They kept the relentless punk attitude and put it into the vision of creating big-eared, spectacular songs, looking for that direct sensibility that touches between emotion and nostalgia. There’s no shame in writing big-eared songs, especially if they’re meshes populated by a renewed idea of rock’n’roll, without – necessarily – a camp activity and with the guitar at the centre. The high we were talking about earlier can be translated into an idea of “bigger than life”, and Sheer Mag try to achieve this by using formulas from 1970s music. Often, halfway through the song, the intonation of Christina’s voice, or a subtle variation in the drums or even a guitar riff seems to point to a sudden change to a hit we all know, be it something by Fleetwood Mac or Tom Petty, or an exultation by T-Rex, but it never happens. There’s beauty in the suggestion, unintentional or not, and what remains, after all, is this idea of sending songs out at the limit of the throats, the volume, and making everyone happy. AS
