Pitchfork

The cover of White Magic's debut EP, Through the Sun Door, sports a carefully arranged collage of graying occult kitsch: skulls of various sizes and colors, a yellowing palmistry chart, dice, feathers, a pentagram, a Celtic cross, a peace button, glass-encased roses, pictures of eyeballs, a Buddha, a stuffed black cat wearing a gold chain. Obviously fine-tuned to reflect White Magic's bizarre goth-folk aesthetic, the assemblage flits endlessly between the personal and the peculiar: part-head shop, part-attic trunk, part-seasonal Halloween store buried in the back of the suburban mall.

It's an impressive display-- weird and comforting at the same time-- and as a visual representation of the band's music, it succeeds remarkably. White Magic's rambling freak-folk is somehow perfectly reflected in each petrified rose petal, waxy skull, and scorpion-set-in-amber: a quirky, vaguely intriguing mix of Delta Americana and Euro-gypsy, tossed together with care.

Despite only having only six songs (and clocking in at 22 minutes), Through the Sun Door can seem inconsistent and half-cooked. Still, the EP manages to show plenty of promise: There's a moment on the otherwise benign "Keeping the Wolves from the Door" during which vocalist Mira Billotte's voice seems to reach its outer limits, tottering for a few glorious seconds on the edge of total dissolution. Mostly, Billotte howls like a dreamier Eleanor Friedberger, forsaking The Fiery Furnaces' gruff, trilling proclamations for blissed-out bits of campfire verse. But the potential for apocalyptic breakdown remains at a continual high for White Magic, and when Billotte's throaty strains become heavy with that danger, the exhilaration she emits is both palpable and oddly inviting.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, White Magic occasionally meander a bit too close to the knight-guarded edges of their local Medieval Times fairgrounds: The band tends to blindly embrace the same kind of awkward, barefoot spirituality that goes hand-in-hand with gnawing on giant chicken legs and wearing three layers of princess robes (see "Plain Gold Ring", especially). While not totally unconvincing, the band's gentle strummers tend to be far less engaging than their richer, slightly-less-directed romps. The record's two strongest tracks, "One Note" and "The Gypsies Came Marching After" are both centered on bizarre (and entirely out-of-tune) piano melodies, with guitar clangs, thick percussion, and Billotte's unhinged warbling running in a bunch of weird, paranoid circles. It's a dizzying turn, but ultimately worth its weight in stubbed toes.