Behind the bar of Acud club, between strong bottles of liquor, there’s a white record sleeve printed with the words “are you alone?” It hovers there like a mirror, prodding and reflecting far too unabashedly into the roaring nightlife. In so doing, it’s sure to have brought a guest or two into destabilized quandary. Being destabilized and destabilizing are the two conflicting forces in the great balancing act that characterized the Canadian band Majical Cloudz, the producers of this record, whose singer was Devon Welsh. They were Magical Clouds indeed—the more the band got under their listeners’ skin, the less frequently they played live. And the longer the Pitchfork features became, the more the band withdrew from the public eye. Welsh, who now performs on his own, is a special guy. Just like the record sleeve, he materializes as if from thin air, asking the right questions at the wrong time and hitting the bull’s eye without aiming. As a performer poised between genius and insanity, he’s nervous and unapproachable, embarrassingly direct and uncompromisingly honest, at once the psychiatrist and the patient.

–