Mark McGuire's nostalgia-sopped “Brothers (For Matt)”

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mark mcguire living with yourself

Emeralds mainframe Mark McGuire has a new album, out earlier this month on Editions Mego, called Living With Yourself. You could easily drown in all the lush textures if you forget to hold your breath and float on your back through these tidal guitar washes, which in turn would make a great soundtrack to your next deep sea diving session.

At first we picked the second shortest track on the outing to share, “Moving Apart”, maybe because the bouncing arpeggios remind us of Kraftwerk's “Europe Endless“. But we decided that the best sample-slice of this album is “Brothers (For Matt)” because it gives a taste of the soft-touch guitar work that slowly grows through the album before climaxing in a feel-good post rock jam for the better part of the track before falling headfirst back into the watery, bubbling guitar textures that inhabit much of this stridently pastoral, major-keyed release.

Though the Big Rock Jam At The End Of The Album is a different face than the McGuire you've grown to know through the previous seven tracks, it takes drifting through this whole album (and peeking the album art) to get that McGuire is going for a deep, personal nostalgia trip on Living With Yourself, with the whole eight track trip book-ended and interspersed with home recorded clips by both the artist and his father between 1991 and 1998, and starring Mark and his brother Matt.

Enjoy. Check more release details here.