Coming to grips with Guilt Mirrors, the new triple album by Shocking Pinks, is no doubt a difficult undertaking—trust us, we know. Some have hailed Nick Harte’s new record as “his masterpiece” and others have found it more complicated than that.
Tiny Mix Tapes, for example, gave Guilt Mirrors 2.5 out of 5 stars, noting flaws in the record’s sprawling ambition, obsessive nature, and lack of a clear narrative structure. And yet, the review is an admirable attempt at trying to come to terms with almost 3 hours of music and might well prove a fascinating read for fans of Shocking Pinks:
The fact that it’s alienating, strange, impossible to get through and occasionally radically boring isn’t a slight, because that’s not the point. It’s too much and too real and too close and too far away.
(…) [Guilt Mirrors] is like a traumatic event that leaves such an ineffable mark on you that you find yourself describing it completely differently every time you speak of it, which is often.
Shocking Pinks is not a project afraid to bleed, to show something, to press their tongue up against the keyhole (…), even if they don’t want to be let in, or know where they are, or know what’s wrong.”
Read Alex Griffin’s full review of Guilt Mirrors over at Tiny Mix Tapes.