Album Of The Week: Mark McGuire Along The Way

If you're old enough to actually remember the 1980s, there's a particular sound -- a ticking arpeggio, a guitar made to sound like a synth or a synth made to sound like a guitar -- that probably conjures an instant stomach-flutter excitement in you. It's what you hear on the intro of the Alan Parsons Project's "Sirius," or Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger." It's that rippling echo, that shiver before the screaming guitars and triumphant shout-along lyrics come in. Sometime during the decade, that sound became a sort of cultural shorthand for "some shit is about to happen." You'd hear it, and you sometimes still do, during NBA-team introductions. It would play while a team of attendants carried Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat and his leather-jacketed pet komodo dragon to the ring during the 1989 Great American Bash. And more than what followed it, that simple sound would create this pavlovian goosebump effect. With "The Instinct," the best song on his new album Along The Way, Mark McGuire has taken that sound and made an entire 12-minute epic out of it. That bubbling stays throughout, and it never quite loses its anticipatory on-the-edge quality. But when the screaming guitars come in -- and they do, eventually -- they're deep in the mix, and they're not the focal point. Instead, McGuire uses that sound to stretch out, to blur, to fade. In his hand, it becomes a gummy, aquatic bliss-out. He keeps layering sounds on top of it, but the build is so gradual that you almost don't notice the song becoming this towering Boredoms-worthy freakout. While "The Instinct" is playing, it might not occur to you that the song is 12 minutes long, since it all seems to unfold so naturally. And when it's over, it doesn't leave you with that "something is about to happen" impression. Instead, it leaves you with the slow-dawning realization that something just happened.