Gotye: Making Mirrors

     Gotye (real name Wouter "Wally" DeBacker) has been around for several years, though very few people, especially in the United States, have heard of him.  With the release of his third Album, Making Mirrors, the cat is out of the bag.
        Gotye, a multi-instrumentalist, uses his own talents and the aid of a talented producer, to produce a simply amazing art-pop album.  Gotye has long utilized instruments from all continents of the globe, but until now, has been unable to congeal them into a cohesive album.  Where his previous efforts would document his extensive knowledge from one song to the next, Making Mirrors ties his musical globetrotting into cohesive, easily swallowed, pop songs that are full of emotion and tact.  There are only a couple of instances of Gotye wandering off in too avante-garde a territory, but his keen sense of pop structure reels him back in.  Gotye opts to bundle his work into a retro-pop genre( a style befitting for his voice, which is reminiscent of Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, and Sting), but layers each song with loops of the unique instruments that made him famous in the first place.  The result is an album that can be appreciated on both a critical and popular plane, and be enjoyed with as much superficiality or depth as the listener chooses.  Despite the painfully catchy songs, Making Mirrors is not a work of bubblegum pop;  an extreme amount of toil has gone into this work of art.