1) Making Mirrors; 2) Easy Way Out; 3) Somebody That I Used to Know; 4) Eyes Wide Open; 5) Smoke and Mirrors; 6) I Feel Better; 7) In Your Light; 8) State of the Art; 9) Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You; 10) Giving Me a Chance; 11) Save Me; 12) Bronte
Still as shapeshifting as its predecessor but with a bigger confidence and flashes of the real Gotye behind all the genre exercises. And it's got the hits.
Key tracks: "Somebody That I Used to Know", "State of the Art", "Giving Me a Chance"
Gotye's - Wouter de Backer's - music is defined by its boundlessness, in that there is no definitive trait to it. It's a project centered around a single person's creativity but not limited by any notion of an established style to follow, and rather moving wherever the whim takes with whatever assets there are at hand. "Somebody That I Used to Know", the signature hit that's come to define Gotye, is on Making Mirrors but I'd be willing to bet that a number of people who ended up with the album in their collection after the fact listened it with mixed feelings, because there's little else like it on the album - beyond, of course, that maximalist, wide-screen notion of artsy pop music that happily walks its own trails.
The general freely wandering style and sound followed by a breakout hit could just as well describe Making Mirrors' predecessor, Like Drawing Blood - both albums operate under the same banner of unpredictability and share the same traits, even going so as far as both albums featuring an out-of-nowhere old-school soul jam (in this album's case, "I Feel Better") and a big breakaway hit ("Heart's a Mess" effectively made Gotye a star in his local Australia in the fashion "Somebody That I Used to Know" would make him globally). Making Mirrors isn't a change from what came prior, but rather a refinement: it's more cohesive even with its variety and its footholds to its chosen ideas are firmer. I'm certain it wasn't designed with it in mind, but especially in retrospect it sounds like a more confident, ambitious version of Like Drawing Blood: the tighter sequel fit for global attention.
The song that achieved that breakthrough, "Somebody That I Used to Know", slightly towers over Making Mirrors. It speaks well of the song's strengths that it's managed to become this ubiquitous one-hit wonder, because the scene at the time certainly wasn't openly welcoming any quietly building and slowburning indie pop songs that take a good minute and a half to get to its first, carefully peaking chorus. But "Somebody That I Used to Know" won people over out of nowhere, and much of that's arguably in how brilliantly it holds attention as it builds its tension. It's a spring constantly tightening, an ostensibly bright tune with its xylophone flourishes masking a frustration that keeps the listener in its grip like a great story. Then Kimbra comes in, flips the narrative upside down and lets the tension explode at the end of her verse- the finale of the song consisting of both her and Gotye getting all that seething build-up underneath the song's calm exterior finally out. The song's got hooks for days sure - the xylophone melody and the chorus are both instant earworms - but it's that slowly unfurling emotion that really makes it such a standout and which still grips with each listen.
If Gotye had had some kind of foresight on the song's success and had made "Somebody That I Used to Know" the template for the full album, it'd likely have been a series of diminishing returns. But it ends up being just another chapter that Gotye briefly touches before the next, and right from the next song he's already moving towards whole different territories with the stadium-drum anthem "Eyes Wide Open" and the surprisingly convincing soul flashback "I Feel Better" following right close-by. Making Mirrors' restlessness is one of its strengths, with Gotye jumping into each idea in full and giving it his all for 3-4 minutes like he's fashioning a template for a full album out of each song, right before whisking it away for the next blind jump. There's a particularly great sentiment I'm borrowing from another review, which describes how Making Mirrors is ostensibly a release that is completely centered around a single singer/songwriter, but that Gotye has no desire to let that limit himself in instrumentation or ideas, and instead sees it as a liberating way to do absolutely whatever. While Like Drawing Blood already had this in spades, Making Mirrors really goes to town with the idea. Something like "State of the Art" is absolutely daft in theory: a reggae tune with robotic vocals, singing about the wonders of a real-life synthesizer like an extended advert, with "orchestral" flourishes throughout provided by that very same synthesizer. It's both alluring as well as creepy, like the devil enticing the listener by sweet talking. And somehow, it's incredible: a song where melody, production, mood and the sheer surreality of the concept make for intense, fascinating bedfellows. It's Making Mirrors' proof of concept: the brightest example of Gotye throwing himself all-in into an idea, no matter what it is. It's also an apt proof of the talent at display, because just on idea alone it could easily crash and burn badly - and rather, it's one of the clear standout moments.
While individually "Somebody That I Used to Know" and "State of the Art" might be more definitive, the final stretch of Making Mirrors is its most impactful. Gotye has mentioned that the writing process of the album was affected by flashes of introspection and depression throughout, and the trio of "Giving Me a Chance", "Save Me" and "Bronte" are a set of vulnerable, tender moments where that's the clearest - where the rest of the album so far has seen Gotye put on different uniforms, here it's just Wouter de Backer in his own clothes. "Giving Me a Chance" is fragile and hazy, a careful expression of hope that barely masks the vulnerability in Gotye's voice, "Save Me" breaks through that haze with clarity and grandeur as it reaches out to the listener in a fashion that channels how Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush handled pop formulas in the 80s, and "Bronte" acts as the calm lullaby to wish a final farewell with, a final moment of intimacy after a record full of big expressions. The three songs form a natural flow from one mindset to another - the one occasion where Making Mirrors actually does so, rather than switching channels abruptly with each song - and they're all fueled by a graceful elegance the album's avoided so far. It's a calm and personal ending for an album that makes its wild swings its main characteristic, but the final impression it leaves is incredible as a result: the awe and wonder of album's twists and turns turned into a set of emotional hooks that can touch quite strongly if you leave your guards down.
If there are any downsides, it's that the usual caveats which apply to any style-shifting release like this are present on Making Mirrors as well, in that the running order may as well have been shuffled and inevitably there's a few songs where the ideas haven't been as strong as elsewhere - namely the slightly annoyingly super-perky "In Your Light" really doesn't support its near-five minutes and the dub moods of "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You" meanders around a little too non-descriptively. But they're light blemishes rather than obvious tarnishes, and they don't take away from the imagination and energy Gotye otherwise displays throughout Making Mirrors. It's an album that just as much impresses through its songs (and there are certainly more points to highlight here than already mentioned, e.g. the criminally short "Easy Way Out" that frantically opens the album after the intro track) as it does through its creator. Gotye as an artist presents a kind of untamed excitement, coming across like a mad creator at work who displays an intriguing creativity even when missing the mark. Those signs were already there on the previous albums of course, but Making Mirrors feels like the peak of that particular evolutionary path, creating the most elaborate version of what Gotye seems to want to achieve, even if it's not perfect and I'm not sure whether I prefer this over Like Drawing Blood. Of course after this record Gotye seems to have withdrawn himself from recording under his own name so it's getting harder to find out if whatever he would pull next would further build up on that. He'll likely be written down in pop culture history as a quirky one-hit-wonder, but to define him solely through that one song feels absurd when even the album itself steers away from being defined by any particular single idea it presents.
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