My mental image of Magik Markers - as a bunch of Thurston-approved miscreants with little care for such notions as actually playing their instruments - was disabused by Elisa Ambrogio’s show stealing performance alongside Ben Chasny with Six Organs Of Admittance the other week.  Their own particular brand of sonic scuzziness has hitherto been documented solely on a series of CD-Rs, making Boss their first album proper and/or first proper album.  It is not at all what anyone would expect, and is all the better for it. 

Although perhaps expectedly, it does roll in on a wall of squall.  It  becalms upon a stoner riff, and then Ambrogio’s vocals surface atop, and suddenly I’m listening to Kim Gordon-sung Sonic Youth circa Sister – in fact, when during the frenetic “Body Rot”, she sings “I’ve got a…”, my inner Thurston steps in with a nicely timed “…catholic block”.  The similarity continues with the abstract poetry/nonsense – you choose - of the sprawling “Last of The Lemach Line” (“I am the secular pentocost squeezing out the blue snake!”…yes, and your specialist subject is what, contestant?).  A few tracks in, when I’m already feeling this is a more disciplined effort than I would have predicted, they nail my jaw to the floor and hammer a piano ballad to the inside of my skull – sweet, naïve and utterly charming.  After the drone piece “Pat Garrett”, they come back to finish me off with the Mazzy Star fuzzy loveliness of “Bad Dream”, which means I’m barely cognisant of the slightly disappointing haven’t-you-done-this-one-already sludgy stuff at the end.

Boss is available from the Ecstatic Peace store.