Gotye: Hearts A Mess
Gotye’s album “Like Drawing Blood” was recently named as iTunes Album of the Year for 2008. An incredible achievement for an artist who recorded the album in his bedroom by night whilst working as a librarian by day.
Whilst perhaps a surprising result to many, the Belgium born Gotye had already won a plethora of prestigious awards in his adopted home of Australia, including the Australian equivalent of both the Mercury Music Prize (AMP) and Brit Awards (ARIA for Best Male Artist) as well as the Australian Independent Records album of the year.
For Like Drawing Blood, Gotye cut loops of calypso, reggae bass, Tijuana brass, 50s film score strings and combined them with emotional swathes of harmonized vocal colour and bold melodic strokes. A detailed task, the resultant brew is an evocative collage of sounds with their own cultural flavours and heartfelt melodic brilliance.
Hearts A Mess is the album’s orchestral centrepiece and from the initial pluck of the harp string, the gentle swell of violins, a lush beachcombing slide guitar, backed by that most sumptuous swinging rhythm it opens a kaleidoscope of feelings, with Gotye’s blue-eyed soul voice having shades of Peter Gabriel.
Originally released as a super limited seven inch single in May 2008, this expanded 2009 release includes previously unavailable and wonderful remixes from Supermayer and Joe Hardy.
““Hearts A Mess” is ….the most majestic single you’ll hear all year. A cinematic pop masterpiece …. It sounds like nothing else out there right now, a timeless pop classic unrestrained by genre or critical expectations, and it’s the kind of special, once-in-a-lifetime single that rarely comes along in this increasingly homogenized indie scene.” 10/10 Neon Gold/ Good Weather For Airstrikes
