Mark McGuire is as busy as ever, this year having released a compilation, ‘A Young Persons Guide to Mark McGuire’, collaborated with Trouble books as well as keeping up his duties with his band The Emeralds. ‘Get Lost’s is a long progression from last years ‘Living with Yourself’, it abandons the noise and driven almost rock reminiscences of this earlier work and moves to more effects and layering experiments that easily display inclination towards a studied musicality. Title track ‘Get Lost’s opens the album with its chords building in minimal rounds and the evidence of the solo drone musicians use of effects pedals well evident in the work which builds the sound before unleashing the electric guitar on the track to take it squarely into noise territory. That moment being over it gives way to ‘When you’re Somewhere [you ought to be there]’, whose well composed bright acoustic guitar is high in the mix with electronics under layered delivering a full sound with moments of vocal soaring and electronic drama without losing track of it’s essential simplicity. The move towards greater composition and studied material over experimentalism is clearer than in the track ‘Alma’ with the inclusion of voice in quasi chant multi layered to gain full choral effect, where electric guitar is played against acoustic. McGuires inclinations with the acoustic guitar are heading towards Frippish territory, displaying a precision and obsession with repeating patterns that creates riffs closer to ostinato and eschewing the bleed of pedal effects rife amongst the work of a noise experimentalist journeyman. The ‘Alma Reprise/Chances are’ takes the layered chant with effects and heads it straight into guitar and electronics intensity that almost heads towards a dense complexity without dissolving into sonic sludge. The album is completed by the inclusion of the delicate ‘Firefly constellation’ that has electronics emitting chirps and burbling sounds as a backing for acoustic displays of a calm and simple chord progressions building with minimal additions until the frenzy of the electronics take over in what must evoke a swarming effect. Only to calm down for the denouement of the track and to exit, the ear satiated.
Innerversitysound
