At his best, Gotye (stage name of Australian musician Walter De Backer) hearkens back to a time when the crop of middlebrow male pop stars wasn't so lousy with simpering troubadours or assembly-line idols. Instead, the ranks were populated by guys like Peter Gabriel, George Michael, and Hall & Oates, who sang forcefully and made bold pop hits with intelligent, grown-up themes. Artists who also had broad sonic appetites and arty predilections, guaranteeing their work would sometimes frustrate, but would remain intriguing.
On his last solo album, 2006's Like Drawing Blood, Gotye achieved the abstraction and restlessness of good art-pop, but failed to bring enough actual pop to the equation. The album was an inspired, dense blend of globe-spanning sounds, yet it meandered far too frequently. Many of the songs stretched between five and seven minutes long, and found him stitching together multiple sounds and ideas at the detriment of shape or focus, eschewing pop's vital sense of urgency. Fortunately, with his newest release, Making Mirrors, Gotye has figured out how to remain sonically voracious while still giving his listeners a sturdy foothold. He finds room here for psych-rock, soul, earnest balladeering, creepy retro-futurism, electronic and Tropicalia touches, and, yes, scads of serious-minded 1980s pop. It's in that last category that most of album's best moments reside. Without ever settling in one spot too slavishly or lengthily to come off like a mere imitator, Gotye deploys his sincere, powerfully expressive voice (under-utilized on Like Drawing Blood) in evoking those bombastic 80s pop architects referenced above. "Somebody That I Used to Know" and "Eyes Wide Open" dramatically convey the acrimony and finality of a shattered relationship, while "In Your Light" and "Save Me" offer up the redemptive side of the coin.
These declamatory studio-pop moves don't just represent many of Making Mirrors' highlights; their shared style and tone also really helps hold the album together, compensating for Gotye's scattershot attention span elsewhere. Admittedly, some of these one-offs are very good – the Cee-Lo/Jamie Lidell-approved retro-soul of "I Feel Better" is the kind of thing that actually works far better as an isolated detour than an organizing principle. The same is true for the guileless "Giving Me a Chance" (which somehow manages to favorably evoke Travis) and the "Drive My Car"-styled acid-rock blast "Easy Way Out". Only occasionally does Gotye wander too far off the reservation, but by that point he's earned his quirks, and so the bizarrely pitch-shifted, suburbia-tech nightmare "State of the Art" and eerily whispered, Reznor-ish "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You" feel more like an endearingly loopy sidebars than self-indulgent, momentum-derailing bores. Gotye's exemplary pop sense may be the big revelation of Making Mirrors, yet it's his arty restlessness that will continue to keep him interesting.
