Premiere: Mark McGuire & Charles Berlitz: “MR”.

February 21, 2012, 2 comments

This is basically the raddest release of 2012 so far, Emeralds guitar eminence Mark McGuire and original hypnagogia superstar and Skaters legend Spencer Clark aka Fourth World Magazine aka Monopoly Child Star Searchers aka whatever, here operating under his newish moniker Charles Berlitz (who “writes for Fourth World Magazine“), with a 45-minute exercise of laid-back, fuzzed-out surf pop that arrives “just in time for the Aussie Summer” and that’s “devoted to sick beaches like Mermaids and Swami’s or Sunset Cliffs and Bondi”. Inner Tube is built around Clark’s slacker rhythms and sees him employing a nice blend of keyboards, drums, vocals and samples all delightfully muffled, while the real focal point of course has to be McGuire’s contemplative, yearning guitar play, a stupendous combination that results in the most incredible dreamlike melancholia musings this side of paradise.

Listen to album track “MR” below, a mournful longing for Mark Richards, who today lives in semi-retirement in Newcastle, New South Wales, “with his wife, Jenny, and three children, Kyle, Nathan and Grace”, where “he runs the Mark Richards Surf Shop in Hunter St, the same shop started by his parents”. Sigh.

Inner Tube is out now. Get it at Experimedia (US), Volcanic Tongue (UK and Europe), or directly via Pacific City Sound Visions.