J.R. Taylor

Forget what you've heard about Franz Ferdinand and Interpol and other douchebags proclaimed as '80s acts. Those bands are, in truth, influenced by the '90s. Specifically, they are the younger brothers of the fashion models who made up our Downtown scene of 1992. Remember those guys in the lime-green dress shirts, sharkskin suits and carefully tousled hair? You saw them in ads for clear liquors, and they never went away.

The gene pool for the likes of Interpol and The Strokes is a short backwash to plenty of local bands with pretty bad timing-and whose legacy long ago was ripped from the $1 bins and tossed into landfills. No great loss. Elastica got caught ripping off Wire, but today's cretins simply cite Gang of Four because it's even less cool to rip off recent U2.

In contrast, Elefant is a true '80s band-and they're lifting their style from a false memory of when the '80s were actually catchy. It's as if the decade never became mired in bands trying to emulate REM, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Pixies or The Replacements. None of those bands sound like Elefant, but the '80s would've been catchier if they had.

Their 2003 release, Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid, already distanced Elefant from their lesser contemporaries (although it's fun to keep invoking them). Now The Black Magic Show takes the band further from their unfortunate time and place, as Elefant embraces a shameless moodiness and sensitivity. There's a genuinely daring undercurrent throughout the album-best signified by a total disrespect for anything cuddly or swaggering.

The Black Magic Show is the work of guys who no longer care about how their suit jackets look in the light of day. The classical references are middlebrow, but the brooding musicianship slaves away in the service of catchy pop greatness. The songs are only exotic in the same sense that melody and dramatics seemed positively European once those punks finished spitting up like good old boys.

Fortunately, there's a New Europe nowadays, and privileged frontman Diego Garcia does his best to make his native Argentina seem like part of the Union. And if he sounds like a bit of a creep-well, what of it? We already said Garcia isn't American. Besides, it wasn't his pathetic notion to build a rock music scene out of overpriced cocktails and velvet ropes.