Atlanta’s JR Wicker is one mysterious dude. He’s got no social media presence, no past releases and, pretty much, no press to speak of. Today he drops a massive debut LP, Weird Magic, seemingly out of nowhere. There’s catchy indie pop with “World in Me” and “Darkness.” There’s epic numbers like “Window” and “Curse.” But the real gem here is “Telepathy”, which sounds like a lost Mercury Rev classic.
About the song, Wicker states “This one’s about not wanting to subscribe to normalcy. When you hear something come out of someone’s mouth, maybe even your own, and it just seems like recycled from something we’ve been fed.”
Call me crazy I think it’s their vision to recycle my mind in telepathy prison.
NO THEY WON’T TAKE ME.
NO THEY WONT TAKE ME.
NO THEY WONT TAKE ME TO TELEPATHY PRISON
“Weird Magic was such an interesting batch of songs to work on,” Wicker explains. “In ‘Telepathy’ for example, I hired a clarinet player but told him I wanted it so affected people wouldn’t know what instrument it was. In this way, the music was conceived conceptually without knowing exactly how it would come out.”
“Telepathy” is a blur of overlapping voices, quicksilver guitar rhythms, and the aforementioned clarinet irregularities. The song bounces around on a series of non-terrestrial frequencies, a series of sounds beamed in from some distant celestial system. Wicker admits to mainlining Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion during the recording of Weird Magic, and you can hear their influence on “Telepathy.”
This song is a real head trip. “Telepathy” can be found on the LP, Weird Magic, out today. You can find it on all of your favorite streaming locations, as well as Wicker’s Bandcamp page.
