Album Review: Mark McGuire - Beyond Belief
By Daniel Marco, Contributor
[Dead Oceans; 2015]
Rating: 3.5/5
Key Tracks: “The Naacals,” “True Love (Song for Rachel),” “Belief”
Beyond Belief, the fifth album by former Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire, is an unusual marriage of progressive rock and electronic music into one genre, yielding mixed results.
The album is evenly split between normal length tracks and extended tracks; “The Past Presents the Future,” “Earth: 2015,” “Locked in Our Sky Language (for Cyan)” and “Belief” all run for over 10 minutes, while the rest are generally four minutes or less.
The album opens with “The Naacals,” a song that gently sprinkles guitar riffs over a slow electronic beat before transitioning into a more distorted riff with a solo. It’s the best track on the record, showcasing the exciting possibilities of blending rock and electronic sounds.
The next noteworthy track is “True Love (Song for Rachel),” an acoustic track that slowly picks up speed and volume before crescendoing into an explosion of noise at the end. Closing out the record is “Belief,” a 12-minute track that explores peaks and valleys of volume and tempo.
Though there is a lot of fascinating music here to enjoy, Beyond Belief also bogs itself down at times. The lengthier tracks grow stale by about the five minute mark, forcing the listener to sit through another seven to 10 minutes of the same loops over and over again. The album could’ve benefited from shorter, more concise renderings of the songs. However, McGuire should be applauded for his ambitious venture in combining guitar driven progressive rock and electronic music. This album is worth a listen, at the very least to hear its fresh, energetic approach to blending genres.
