Get Lost is a timid step back from the ambition and unsubtle nostalgia of Living With Yourself, but is not quite a regression. It still has all the familiar elements – placidity, brightness (the clearing-in-the-woods type), riff-rhythm hybrids, and good ol’ shredding.
[Release page] The immensity of Mark McGuire’s back catalog is comforting if you’re into the kind of music he makes, which isn’t to say it’s monotonous – just pleasantly redundant, like state forests. It’s hard to believe McGuire has gotten so much quality mileage from variations on Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions For Electric Guitar, but he has, at the rate of five to ten EP’s or LP’s per year (I can’t tell, being a completionist is hard with this stuff), and this is in addition to his work with Emeralds. Daunting? No, because McGuire doesn’t change his approach radically between projects, so you don’t have to hunt down every out-of-print tape to understand a soon to be out-of-print one. A listen to Guitar Meditations Vol. II, which, for the record, is the best McGuire album not available in stores, will bring anyone up to speed here.
Get Lost is a timid step back from the ambition and unsubtle nostalgia of Living With Yourself, but is not quite a regression. It still has all the familiar elements – placidity, brightness (the clearing-in-the-woods type), riff-rhythm hybrids, and good ol’ shredding. But there’s a heavier focus on electronics and pacing, plus McGuire has added his own voice to the mix, with elocution this time, not as a background chant or a childhood recording. Nothing shocking, but Get Lost clearly isn’t supposed to be the kind of manifesto McGuire would have liked Living With Yourself to have been. As a self-portrait that album was a bit of an overreach, and Get Lost finds McGuire tiptoeing outside the shadow of what Living With Yourself tried to be.
This is a smart move. Instead of outdoing himself he’s mirroring what Emeralds accomplished with Does It Look Like I’m Here, abridging the profusion of their songs (and discography), perhaps in a stab at digestibility. The most potent of these distillations are the title cut and “Chances Are,” both of which carry the usual strumming atop a radiant pulse beating faster than McGuire’s normal rate. Other highlights include “Another Dead End,” whose concluding thunderstorm will remind veteran Emeralds listeners of Skyramps, McGuire’s excellent collaboration with fellow synth freak Oneohtrix Point Never. And while the 20-minute closing piece isn’t succinct like the others on Get Lost, it’s still a refinement of McGuire’s past work. He rarely bores, but “Firefly Constellations” is long-form McGuire at his least aimless, meandering with purpose by a stream of burbling distortion. As a way of finishing off the album, in fact, it’s appropriate, as it shows that McGuire is not only getting better at condensing his ideas, but he also hasn’t lost his touch at making vast islands of semiconscious bliss.
Why Get Lost was chosen as an Editions Mego follow-up and not a limited run CDr is beyond me, as the progression it shows, however discernible, is slight. But even though the way McGuire churns out music approaches predictability, each new offering preposterously supplies undeniable pleasure and reasons to listen again. Get Lost is no exception, despite sitting safely within McGuire’s oeuvre, and it deserves a place on your shelf. There are worse things than evolution by baby steps.
Get Lost is out now on Editions Mego. [Release page]
