2012.08.09 Mark McGuire - Living With Yourself

Color: Black

Released: 2010, October 1

Label: Editions Mego

I usually champion going to an actual brick-and-mortar store and hanging out for some time over discovering music via the internet, but there’s always an exception to the rule. And I’m sure I wouldn’t be fooling anyone if I said I never discovered or became curious about an artist because of the interwebs. So it is that I found out about Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire’s work released under his own name. If memory serves I read a review and listened to a track from this record via some website. But I will be honest about is that from there I did not proceed to download the whole record. No, instead I marched my ass down to a record store and searched for said record. Something I haven’t done in a hot second and kinda miss. Anyway, Living With Yourself  is a nostalgia-inducing meditation of McGuire’s sublime noodling on guitar. Most tracks consist of multiple delayed guitars overlapping to create pastoral compositions that alone seem to put the listener in a contemplative frame of mind. But when you consider that the recordings are also laced with sound bites of the artist’s youth, another bit of narrative is introduced and it’s easy to forget that these are not happenings from your own life. It’s a bit mesmerizing and also reassuring that beauty can be found in even the most mundane moments one would have chosen to have some sort of old tape-recorder rolling during. This sense of being transported to another time from one’s past is most successfully achieved at the very beginning of closing track “Brothers (For Matt)” as we are witness to a recorded conversation between a father and his two young boys. This then gives way to the album’s only track with drums - a sprawling epic of distorted guitar that sounds like the most epic indie rock the nineties could have ever served up. Fittingly, this collection is packaged up in a series of pictures from years gone by - which drives home the experience of something so reflective of the past. The type on the front is there merely to serve its purpose and in no way interfere with the main concept of the art. I do like the way thin rules appear between the type and photos - introducing just a bit more organization and emphasis on the photos. Definitely pick this up if you’re looking for a trip or to listen to while working and searching for that zen moment.