We are very honoured to premiere the new single ‘What You See Is What You Get’ from Sydney’s brilliant Magnetic Heads: a gloriously rich synth-injected eighties-influenced motorik blast. Singer/songwriter Des Miller has the velvet rich, deep and resonant vocals of Ian Curtis, David Bowie or Iggy Pop, and the band has the syncopated rhythms and musical flow of Kraftwerk, New Order or M83, with a guitar refrain that echoes The The. There’s a dynamic and pulverising forward motion with slightly disconnected vocals singing mesmerising lines:
What you see is what you get,
there’s no use swimming through regret.
Well if I think the things I think I said, I think I said I did,
then I must have done them.
I choose
I choose
Dramatise philosophise, reprise
Dramatise philosophise, reprise
Miller says of the themes of the song:
The song is note to self to remember that the huge soupy mess of our past actions are not worth obsessing over and regretting. That what matters is our next choice.
He takes a philosophical approach to perception:
There’s a brutally elegant philosophy that suggests reality is a figment of our perception; that what you see is what you get. I’m interested in the slippery phenomena of agency and identity – the gap between what we think about ourselves, what we do, what other people perceive and how they interpret those perceptions.
Suffuse with a Euro-disco sparkle, this is a magnificent track that shines and glitters with an enigmatic presence and intelligence. You can have an exclusive listen through the link below:
Magnetic Heads – the work of singer/songwriter Des Miller and producer/musician Liam Judson (Belles Will Ring, Lewis Goldmark) – turned my head with their earlier single ‘Time of Your Life’ (see my review here) and both tracks will be on a new album recorded by Miller and Judson in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. Entitled ‘Moral Outage’, it will be released on 13 August 2021 through Broken Stone Records/Remote Control. Fabulous!
