Dim Wizard chases the magic

Before Dim Wizard kicked off a short run of shows on Election Day, there was a noticeably different vibe to everything – even the weather. On the drive from Washington D.C. to Cleveland for the tour opener, the musicians encountered 70-degree temperatures and endless, sunny skies. 

“And then we woke up to the final results [on Wednesday] and the sky had just gone gray,” said singer and songwriter David Combs, who will join Dim Wizard bandmates Emma Baker, John Hand, Fiona Kohrmam and Owen Wuerker in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Saturday, Nov. 16. “And then we spent the next few days making pretty long drives … and all of them were gray and off and on raining.”

The shows themselves have also felt somewhat muted, with multiple opening bands dropping off the bills, with one saying that they just didn’t feel up to performing at the moment, given the state of things. “And, yeah, I totally understand,” Combs said. “Not everyone is up for a fun rock show right now, and I can’t blame them.” 

Previously, Combs explored these exhaustive, colorless cycles in their primary band, Bad Moves, whose album Wearing Out the Refrain, from 2024, managed to channel the repetitive drudgery of recent years into a series of effortlessly buoyant power pop jams. With Dim Wizard, though, the musician has taken a different tack, their songs frequently hinging on the idea of breaking free or chasing down some bit of lost wonder. “I chased the magic back when I was young,” sings guest vocalist Steve Ciolek of the Columbus band Superviolet on “Ride the Vibe.” “If something got in my way/That’s when I got on the road.”

The musician traced the escapist quality that exists in some of the songs to the project having been conceived during lockdown, at a point in time when they were readily imagining altered realities. There’s also a collaborative spirit to the project – “Ride the Vibe” also features contributions from Illuminati Hotties and Jeff Rosenstock – that Combs said was born of a desire to find connection amid solitude. 

“When the lockdown happened, Bad Moves was about to put out a record, and I had booked two tours for us and was in the denial stage for a long time. I was like, ‘Okay, this tour is canceled but we’re going to rebook it for a couple months later.’ Then eventually people were like, ‘Stop trying to rebook your tour.’ And it got to a point where it was like, maybe this is forever now,” Combs said. “And so, I sort of conceived Dim Wizard as a way to be engaging with my music peers and friends, and to be able to collaborate, which I think is one of the most beautiful things about playing music, pulling in all of these different people’s weird brains and then mixing it all together.”

The various collaborators also helped to amplify different shades in the songs, with the higher, warmer tone of Ciolek’s voice lending “Ride the Vibe” a more wistful feel compared to the version Combs has been delivering on tour, which they said draws out more of the tune’s inherent strangeness. “I’ve almost done myself a disservice by employing some talented vocalists on the recordings,” said Combs, who added that Ciolek should be on hand to sing when Dim Wizard visits Bourbon Street, the two having developed a friendship over nearly 20 years after first meeting at Berea Fest in Cleveland, back when Ciolek and his Sidekicks bandmates were still workshopping together at the Soggy Dog House.

Other Dim Wizard songs, such as “X-Games Mode,” take a darkly comic look at current circumstances, with Combs surveying a planet ravaged by global warming and positing that “In 20 odd years we’ll all be underwater/Holding our breath in the endless hereafter/A sold-out foam party with corporate sponsors.”

“We’re trying to kind of frame these dismal thoughts in a somewhat humorous way,” Combs said. “It’s kind of like the fake smile veneer over something in your brain that just cracked.”

For the members of Dim Wizard, these connections to the horrors of the current political and social era are all-too tangible, with four of the five touring members either working or having previously worked for the sister restaurant to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington D.C. restaurant that become the focus of Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, who falsely believed the eatery to be the center of a child-trafficking ring. 

“And the defining way I experienced the 2016 election was through Pizzagate, and through people spinning a conspiracy about our workplace,” said Combs of the falsehoods, which led one person to enter the restaurant with an automatic rifle, firing at least one round, and another to attempt to set in on fire. “And you want to think there’s going to be common ground between your reality and someone else’s, even if it’s just a sliver. … And now it’s all happening again, and it’s taking me right back to that.”

In that way, it could be said Dim Wizard currently exists as something of a balancing act, with some songs rooted in past horrors that have again come to roost, and others attempting to reconnect with the sense of possibility Combs felt when they started making music, and to which they aspire some return. In discussing “Ride the Vibe,” for example, Combs noted that the line “I chased the magic…” appeared in the past tense, suggesting some of their wonder had been shed along the way.

“I think that [line] reveals some amount of distance or jadedness, and certainly jadedness is a really easy space to exist in right now. And maybe the most comfortable space for me is a couple steps past jadedness and into what we were talking about before, where it’s almost this hopeless despair that is so twisted it almost makes you laugh,” said Combs, who then described the softening that took root when Dim Wizard played a recent show in San Antonio, which included a table hosted by folks from a leftist, anarchist library. “And in that, I was having these great conversations, and one of them looked me in the eyes and said, ‘We’re going to win. … This is bad, but people are going to come together, and we’re going to change the world.’ And that has not been a sentiment I’ve been able to tap into for a long time. But hearing it from somebody who had that sparkle of magic in their eyes, it was like, ‘I’m going to take this as a challenge to see where I can tap back into that in my life without denying those grim realities.’ And I think that was something I really needed.”