Mark McGuire - Living With Yourself (2010)

"I like Living With Yourself. A lot. After a few listens, the smooth sheen of McGuire’s playing becomes seductive, the earnestness charming and his methods entrancing. With this album, he’s succeeded in doing what only a few others (Oneohtrix Point Never also comes to mind) have: He’s made music that is experimental without carrying the weighty baggage that term entails, but nor is it anything that might even remotely be considered pop. It’s accessible without condescending to anything or anyone. It’s bold without making a big stink about it. It’s personal without being solipsistic. It’s a musical proof of Umberto Eco’s thesis: “Two cliches make us laugh, but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.”

So all that multi-tracked noodling reveals itself to be a complex weave of spidery melodies, hypnotic, cycling chord progressions and hallucinatory levels of texture. Instead of slick trickery, the bright tone and positive mood of the pieces become a clear-eyed compositional vision. And that earnestness? No, it’s not nostalgia, but a meditation on memory, on how it accrues layers, confuses itself and gains new meanings with every pass we make through it. Turn that metaphor back on the music itself, and it’s an apt description of the subtle magic McGuire works on this album." - Dusted Magazine

Brain Storm (For Erin) and Brothers (For Matt) are utterly amazing. Brothers (For Matt) hits you like a Randy Johnson fastball: after the entire album being much like Emeralds, the band McGuire is the lead guitarist in, or Ducktails with multitudes of guitar loops, McGuire comes out of nowhere with a ten-minute epic starting with a recording of his father interviewing he and his brother, Matt. Something about the recording really hits home for me; it reminds me of childhood and better times. It explodes into easily the loudest moments on the entire LP with McGuire flaming away on his guitar.

If you pass on this one, you'll be kicking yourself - this album encompasses everything that's right with drone music. Think about it for a second: Mark McGuire is 22 years old. He just made one of the best albums of 2010.

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