Music critics often apologize for their habit of endless, unhelpful comparison, but if you ask me it’s just human nature. Parallel to my mental composition of this piece on The World Without Magic—a Brooklyn-based band with a vocalist who sounds a little like David Byrne—I was compulsively preparing a dissertation on which earlier Mario game Super Mario 64 most resembles. (A lot of people would say Super Mario World, but my vote’s for Super Mario Bros. 3, and I’d like to tell you why, but there are limits even in the age of New Journalism.) Sad waste of mental energy as such a preoccupation is, it did sate the slavering beast of comparison just enough to ensure that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will go unmentioned for the remainder of this piece.

Which is good, because The World Without Magic bears little resemblance to everyone’s favorite self-publicized Byrne-channeling band. Their debut self-titled EP owes more to the Big Star template of trebly ’70s pop than to the early Talking Heads’ art-punk jitters—a song like “Never Begun” drips with the same cotton-thin guitar that comprises “September Gurls”—but The World Without Magic dismember their second-hand pop accoutrements and spread them out over five-minute periods, yielding languid, hazy songs that sound like ’70s AM radio played at half-speed and hummed along to by lonesome drunks. “Never Begun” lopes through a spidery mist of strummed guitars for almost two minutes, its mumbled vocals lulling the listener into a false sense of slowcore, until the title phrase leaps above the haze and begins carrying the song to its positively energetic conclusion. There’s something meditative in hearing a song unfold so meticulously and gently.

Elsewhere, “Quiet Life” begins by turning the minimalism to eleven and refusing the vocals all support save a steady drumbeat and distant synths; it isn’t until the three-minute mark that the rest of the band sways in, plays the teasing first half of a slow build, and sways out again, leaving the song to trickle back to its old silence. Like “Never Begun,” “Quiet Life” makes use of an unexpectedly sweet chorus that flutters carefully out of the verses. What prevents The World Without Magic from losing listeners over five and a half minutes is one’s undying desire to hear the choruses again; appreciation for the verses comes unexpectedly with time, a characteristic the band inherits more than any other from the pop songs they’ve dissected. The World Without Magic’s appeal, then, comes down to a comparison—you’ve heard this sound a million times before, but you’ve never heard it used quite like this, with quite this much space and quite this much patience. On the surface, the band bears as much resemblance to Big Star as Mario 64’s gargantuan 3D environments do to Mario Bros. 3’s side-scrolling linearity, but the elements are all there. All it takes is a little unpacking.

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