Guilt Mirrors
It’s been seven years since Nick Harte’s last Shocking Pinks album. Following long periods of turmoil both internal and external, the Christchurch artist returns with a discursive triple album that plays like a collection of sonic scrapbooks, writes ANTHONY CAREW.
?Triple album,? as a phrase, connotes either wild ambition or delirious hubris, but Guilt Mirrors* harbours neither. It *is* a triple album: 35 songs and 160 minutes worth of new music for this Christchurch shoegazer. And, coming seven years after Nick Harte’s last Shocking Pinks LP, 2007?s self-titled affair – his first, and last, for iconic disco-punk imprint DFA – there’s even the possibility for expectation, that the years in between have been spent beavering at studio perfection. Yet, as far as triple albums go, *Guilt Mirrors is striking in its lack of triple-album-ness; in the absence of concept, theme, ego and collaboration. Instead, it’s an insular, fractured, sprawling mess – a collection of sonic scrapbooks in triplicate. Harte hasn’t spent seven years attempting to author a magnum opus, but the sum total of his last seven years is here.
Instead of using three records to erect a shrine to singularity, the vast canvas of a triptych is employed to create conflict, contradiction and confusion. Long, discursive, dissonant and occasionally difficult, it’s music as public therapy; personal transcendence found via an act of commercial suicide. Guilt Mirrors* is no attempt to follow up *Shocking Pinks, because Harte sounds like someone disinterested in music as anything other than a form of personal salvation. Recorded in – and with the spirit of – isolation, it’s a work out to reflect his life, as lived: ?with highs and lows, failures and successes, stops and starts.? The songs are the sonic fallout from an artist dealing with drug addiction, the bursting of his buzz-band bubble and the devastation of his hometown by earthquake.
?If there is a narrative arc, it’s of forms losing their form.?
Harte recorded part of it in Christchurch in 2011, amidst the chaos of a razed city, and once the image has been suggested – of an artist making himself at home in the rubble – it’s hard not to hear it in the music. Comparing songs to forces-of-nature is one of those critical clich’s best avoided, and using vast environmental/social tragedy as the biographical backdrop to appreciating a pop record is questionable. But if Guilt Mirrors isn’t the sound of tectonic plates shifting nor the casualties thereof, then its shattered and scattered fragments communicate something about how it feels for an already-shaky someone to suddenly find himself in the shaken ruins of the familiar; to have buildings, neighbourhoods and community crumble around him. ?I’m gonna drive this car right off this earth,? Harte sings in ?Hospital Garden?, a mumble over fumbled guitar. ?Wanna see some flames, wanna taste the dirt/These bones are all that’s left of this decaying corpse.?
If there is a narrative arc to Guilt Mirrors – Brooklyn-based Stars & Letters, the label daring to wrangle this opus, claims it’s influenced by ?the cinematic structure of auteurs like John Cassavetes, Andrei Tarkovsky and Nicolas Winding Refn? – then it’s of forms losing their form; the architecture of the pop song gradually giving way to the chaos of improv. Disc 1 gives off hints of Harte’s hyped, pastiche-y past: ?Vendetta? rails with dystopian prog-techno, raving towards the darkness; ?DOUBLEVISIONVERSION? struts with rubbery bass and effected cool; ?Love Projection? (dedicated to Jerry Fuchs, the late drummer of !!! and The Juan MacLean) carries a DFA flame; ?Ten Years? is bashful indie-pop jangle; and ?What’s Up With That Girl?? spoons up woozy fuzz-pop reminiscent of Medicine.
?Howling, overdriven, scorched-noise guitar, noxious clouds of sound that pool and drift.?
Shocking Pinks have long earned comparisons to classic shoegaze acts, but Guilt Mirrors* has more in common with the outsider ambient acts that trailed in *Loveless? wake. ?St Louis?, heartbreakingly sung by another wandering Christchurch native, artist Gemma Syme (?I wonder what they’ll put on my grave/At the end of all of my days??), is so whisper-quiet as to evoke Movietone; ?Looks Black Rain? and ?Few Skeletons? spray the kind of endless-horizon, tonal-guitar wash once conjured by Flying Saucer Attack. ?Beyond Dreams? and ?Black Looks Rain? close Discs 2 and 3 in similar Kranky Records-ish fashion: each 11 minutes of howling, overdriven, scorched-noise guitar, noxious clouds of sound that pool and drift, unmoored from rhythm.
It’s not a straight line, nor a straight narrative. There’s a troubling motif with murderous violence – Harte sings of ?strangling a stranger until they can’t breathe? in ?Out of Town Girl?, over a piece of pulsing electro-pop that’s equal parts twee hymnal, and chirps ?I want you/I would kill you? over a double-time Arkitype beat in ?Slightly Killed? – and random acts of levity. None seem more random than the penultimate appearance of a cut called ?Dance the Dance Electric?, which borrows the title of Harte’s debut SP LP and delivers the good-time disco-punk absent elsewhere.
It’s like a glimpsed vision of a happier past, or a memory from his youth. And, after two fleeting minutes, it’s soon swallowed by ?Black Looks Rain’s final pall of squalling, stormy noise; the album ending in the throes of loss, black clouds of noise connoting both devastation and cleansing, the fire and the first buds of new growth sprouting thereafter.
Guilt Mirrors sometimes seems like Harte out to burn down everything his band was ever meant to be – or, at least, the bridges back to his buzz-band past. Calling a track ?Dance the Dance Electric? is a feint: there’s no going back from here, only moving forward; into the somewhere else of a future unknown.
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