The album’s one wholeheartedly joyful song is “State of the Art,” full of pitch-shifted praises of an electric home organ that has built-in drumbeats and simulated choir - a gizmo supreme. There’s the perky little xylophone line in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” the jazzy electric-piano sample that circles through “Smoke and Mirrors,” the galloping beat and floating guitars of “Eyes Wide Open,” the way “In Your Light” meshes hand-clapping, guitar-strumming folk-pop with soul horns and booping electropop.
Gotye worries about humanity destroying the planet through overconsumption in “Eyes Wide Open” and sees an entertainer’s life as a fraud in “Smoke and Mirrors.” He portrays himself as a boyfriend who’s more self-absorbed than sensitive he apologizes for being “wrapped up in myself” in “Giving Me a Chance,” while in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” after he moans about his ex shutting him out, the ex (portrayed by Kimbra) shows up to remind him about “all the times you screwed me over.”īut his snappy pop constructions fight the moping. The terse guitar lick that opens “Somebody That I Used to Know,” for instance, is a few notes from the Brazilian musician Luiz Bonfá. Gotye, a Belgian-Australian songwriter born Wouter De Backer, is largely a one-man studio band, playing many instruments and building songs around samples from a record collection apparently filled with vintage soul, lounge music, soundtracks and exotica. The album merges catchy gizmo-loving pop constructions with a stalwartly depressive mindset. Now “Making Mirrors” arrives in the United States along with Gotye himself, who is performing Monday at the Bowery Ballroom.
First things first: Yes, Gotye sounds a whole lot like Sting when he sings the chorus of “Somebody That I Used to Know.” That tinge of pop familiarity may have helped make the song an international hit when Gotye’s third album, “Making Mirrors,” was released last year in Australia, where he lives.
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