For a guy who trades in dizzy soundscapes and bucolic neo-new age meditations, Mark McGuire is a fairly intense shredder. On stage with his band, Emeralds, he rocks out like Eddie Van Halen, even though the sound coming from the speakers could blend into your yoga teacher's chill-out mixtape. For his solo guitar work, McGuire dials down the bombast, jamming out on simple chord progressions funneled through a bevy of effects pedals.
McGuire has been releasing a consistent stream of tapes, singles, and CD-Rs, both solo and with his band, since the mid-2000s. So he's kicked around the noise and drone world long enough to have a sense of the handicaps inherent in loop- and footpedal-based music. Rather than using effects to gradually gather sounds into a sonic layer cake, he lets his pedals act as an accompaniment and augmentation to his live playing. It gives his music more range, allowing for peaks and valleys rather than a single, linear zone-out.
Get Lost, the full-length follow-up to 2010's Living With Yourself, finds McGuire tightening his routine. It's a more deliberate, less improvisatory effort built around frequently recurring motifs-- mainly, gurgling loops and major key plucking. "I really want the records to be more concise and to zone in on one idea and let it elaborate in different ways throughout the album," he told an interviewer following the release of his compilation record, A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire. "Before maybe it was just getting stoned and jamming for a couple hours, and thinking, 'Man, this tape's going to rule.'" Where Living With Yourself found McGuire sticking to moody, simple melodies, Get Lost inches up the volume a little.
The title track uses a heavily filtered guitar loop to frame gently strummed chords, gradually inching forward in volume and intensity toward a fuzzy climax. "Another Dead End" slowly builds steam on a hypnotic krautrock riff before drifting into a three-chord progression. Though McGuire's sound is heavily influenced by European pedal gurus like Robert Fripp and Vini Reilly, there's something distinctly American in the sound of his soloing. The harmonized leads that end the song owe much to classic-rock radio. Where Living With Yourself struck a contemplative, reflective mood, Get Lost strives for a summery, optimistic feel.
He also takes a stab at vocals. On "Alma" he repeats the single line, "It must resolve, we try and evolve." The theme returns on "Alma (Reprise)/Chances Are". Anybody who has ever spent time with a Robbie Basho record knows that, in the world of mystic new-age guitar, picking up the microphone can be a dicey proposition. McGuire fares fine, though: If anything, his singing provides an island of organic sound amid electronic squiggles.
Then again, he does just fine without words. On the nearly 20-minute closer, "Firefly Constellations", for instance, his live picking slips into and out of an ever-cresting wave of gurgling drones. It's easy to get sucked-- or, right, lost-- in. But even at his most chilled-out, there's always a hint of attitude to McGuire's music. The album's title can be interpreted in two different ways-- one that invites listeners to lose themselves amid a haze of lush, trippy guitar arpeggios and another, less friendly message to go away, or else.
