The Goon Sax's third album,
Mirror II, was born out of an extended period where things changed for the trio.
Louis Forster moved from Australia to Berlin, James Harrison and
Riley Jones formed the post-punk band Soot,
Jones began writing songs for the first time, and then when
Forster moved back, they all three ended up living in a shared house where they were free to collaborate and work on music together all the time. They also were exposed to new influences that ended up playing a large role in the sound of the album. The trio particularly fell in love with the music of the '90s.
Mirror II is made up of big synthesizer washes, distorted guitars, and huge drums sounds, and songs are built around the theory of jamming disparate sounds together in hopes of finding something new. With the help of producer
John Parish, they attempt a big sonic leap from the simple-by-comparison indie pop of their first two records to something more mature and complicated. The results are always interesting but also mixed. When a song works, it works really well. The opening "In the Stone" pairs
Forster's bitterly insightful lyrics with some fine deadpan singing, a clipped rhythmic attack, and some raggedly melodic guitars to give the song the dramatic shadings needed to make it hit hard and sink in deeply. They pull this off a few other times as well, notably on the sweetly strummed "Til Dawn," which adds zippy vintage synths that buzz around the vocals happily, or on the
Jones-written "Tag," where the singsong melody tussles with a phalanx of overdriven guitars, clanking percussion, and almost comically doomy synths. Too many times though, the overdone sound eclipses the songs, even the best of the lot. "Psychic" for example, is a bright and shiny pop song at heart, but it's doomed by the overprocessed guitars, stadium-sized drum hits, and unnecessarily thick synths. It's not bad that the band is trying to expand their sound, it is bad that they too often go far over the top in the process. This state of affairs results in a precariously unbalanced condition, since Harrison's wobbly,
Barrett-lite songs are not given the same brassy '90s treatment. Tracks like "Tracks" and "Carpetry" are closer in spirit to the happy, jangly sound of yore, and they feel very out of place here. So do his vocals, which seem to have gotten even more unpredictable while his bandmates voices have become more polished. Unlike their first two albums, which landed high on the breeziness scale,
Mirror II is a tougher listen. It's clear that the band want to grow and expand their musical horizons but less clear that they are able to do that successfully. That being said, ultimately there is enough craft to the songwriting, energetic verve in the performances, and painful truth in the lyrics that the album is worth listening to, and the band is worth sticking with if only to see where they go from here. ~ Tim Sendra