Today’s Vinyl: Unicorn Magic

Austin has a rich tradition of indie bands with public substance abuse problems, and I’d put these gentlemen near the top of any list of severely inebriated performers. In their brief existence, the Jimmy Bradshaw-led Unicorn Magic regularly graced the inside stage at Emo’s with tales of magic, wonder and childhood joy, at least when they managed to finish the songs all the way through. Most seemed to have three or four false starts and then disintegrated into noise as the acute alcohol poisoning kicked in. Had more than five or ten people ever made it out for their shows, they could have become a true Austin spectacle.

This yellow-vinyl seven inch, released by Frank Kozik’s Rise Records and designed by Bruce Dye, represents the sum of their recorded output, as far as I can determine. The A side is the coulda-been-a-classic Feel Good Gazebo, an uplifting number about a place kids can go when they’re having a rough day, and is pretty representative of the themes the band would tackle regularly, namely: kids, magic, wizardry, fairy tales and, of course, unicorns. No cynics were these boys; every line radiated childlike sincerity and, if you can imagine all of this channeled through a Squat Thrust/Ed Hall kind of twisted guitar attack, you’ve got a pretty good idea of the mindless joy that was Unicorn Magic.