DO YOU KNOW GOTYE?

He has come from downunder, the land of bands like Silverchair and Men At Work, and topped recently the Billboard Hot 100 with the hit “Somebody That I Used to Know” (the first Australian to achieve such accomplishment since Savage Garden did so in 2000),  besides having topped the charts in other 17 countries. His third record, Making Mirrors, is among the best sellers also in several countries. Quite an achievement. And, in general, artists who reach quite a success has some good stuff to show.

In an musical era dominated by women and teen pop, anything that sneaks out of that arena is pretty welcome. Maybe that is why Belgian-Australian singer Gotye was so praised by the public and the critics. On the road since 2002, he had previously experienced a great success with his first two records, Boardface, from 2003, and Like Drawing Blood, 2006. But the release of Making Mirrors in August, 2011, broke all the boundaries and broadcast his name all over the world, mainly because the delighting “Somebody That I Used to Know”, a mixture of a disappointed Jason Mraz with Sting. Gotye has a quite particular musical style, an alternative pop-rock that mixes a diversity of instruments with reflexive and well constructed lyrics, creating an introspective and ethereal atmosphere. Making Mirrors has 12 very good songs, all of them composed by Gotye himself. Its title expresses at the same time the personal feelings he put into each song (or each ‘mirror’) or the several influences that each song mirrors, like The Police in “I Feel Better” and INXS in “Smoke and Mirrors”. Gotye’s lyrics has that sentimental and intimist  tone  a la Jason Mraz, with a slight difference: Gotye is a little less optimistic. In Making Mirrors, verses about the end are more frequente than verses about the middle or the beginning. “Everything we had/Everything we did/Is buried in dust”, he sings in the intense “Eyes Wide Open”, one of the highlights from the record.  Other great moments are the strange “State of the art”, a questioning on technological progress with a futuristic and exotic sonority, and the touching “Save Me”, in which Gotye shares the depression he had been through while producing the album. Making Mirrors é definitely one of those records that does not come up frequently, one of those rare cases where huge sensibility and musical ability joins each other in a piece of art that goes far beyond pre-established definitions. It is a work at the same level of Adele’s 21 or Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, which will probably leave a very positive mark.

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face book: Leonardo Romanov