My first real girlfriend in high school had done all of this before and I had not, and she was not particularly interested in pretending otherwise. I had spent a couple of years building an idea of myself as a guy who would be smooth about it when the moment came, and that idea lasted about four seconds into the moment actually arriving. She knew exactly how long to wait before closing the distance, which is a thing you can only know if you have done it enough times to have opinions about the timing. I did not jack shit. What I remember is not the kiss but the eight or ten seconds before it, when it was obvious what was about to happen and neither of us had moved yet, and my entire nervous system was doing something I had no name for at fifteen.
Magenta Ray built a song out of those eight seconds. “A Kiss Like This” is a dark-wave infused alt rock track that Lisa Hart and Mark Larson wrote in their home studio during the COVID lockdown, which they describe as the best time of their lives, and I believe them, because the song has none of the claustrophobia that most quarantine records carry around. The studio is worth mentioning because it is an addition Mark’s family hand-built onto the Napa Valley house he grew up in, and it looks like a cabin somebody dragged down from Tahoe. Mark’s guitar work is the reason the track lands. He runs a fast-panning tremolo against a chord progression that refuses to resolve where your ear expects it to, and the effect is genuine vertigo, the floor tilting under you while the synth layers surge up from underneath. Garbage and Portishead are the obvious reference points and the band cites them freely, though the guitar tone owes more to the Pretenders than either.
The lyrics are simple, which is the correct choice, because anticipation does not require a vocabulary. Hart opens by playing it innocent, singing “Such a mystical notion you sitting here next to me / Looking into my eyes you say get closer baby / And slide over and give me a kiss.” Nothing has happened. Nothing needs to. The restraint in that opening does most of the work, holding the tension in place while the arrangement builds around it. Then she sings “You make me want to be bad” and the whole pretense collapses in a single line, which is the best moment on the track and the one that separates this from a hundred other songs about wanting somebody. By the time she gets to “You better be careful its so hot in here / Your smoldering eyes burn pulling me closer to you,” the warning is not really a warning, and Hart delivers it with the confidence of a vocalist who understands that she is controlling the tempo of the entire encounter. She makes him wait. She decides when it ends. My high school girlfriend would have recognized the technique immediately.
Hart and Larson have been together ten years, as a couple and as a writing partnership, and they started out doing experimental electronic fusion before the sound consolidated into what it is now. Hart has worked as a healer since she was twenty-one, and she talks about the lyrics as medicine, which sounds like the kind of thing that would sand the edges off a rock song and somehow does not. Larson produces other bands out of the Napa studio. Live, the two of them are joined by Alan Parks on bass and Joe Shotwell on drums, with Frank Acosta adding guitar and violin, and that lineup has played the Blue Note Napa and JAM Cellars Ballroom as part of a Northbay Bands To Watch showcase. They play The Garden in downtown Napa on October 10th, with a record release show planned for later this fall.
Here is what the song gets right. Everything after the first kiss can be learned. You get better at it, you develop a repertoire, you stop thinking about it. What you cannot get back is the version of yourself who did not know yet, standing there with no technique and no plan and a heart rate that would concern a physician. “A Kiss Like This” puts you back in that spot for three and a half minutes, and I came out of it grateful rather than embarrassed, which is not how I usually feel about being fifteen.
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