Gotye – ‘Eyes Wide Open’

Gotye – ‘Eyes Wide Open’

This morning on Triple J Breakfast, Wally De Backer debuted the first new material from his solo project Gotye in almost five years.

I slept through this momentous occasion.

I loved his previous album Like Drawing Blood with every fibre of my being, and with a fervour I hadn’t felt since discovering the profane funk-rock of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a ten year old in rural Queensland.  Every note De Backer sang, played and sequenced was full of pain, nervous energy and the hope that maybe if people were less shit to one another, life could be easier. It was the soundtrack to the honeymoon period of my first serious relationship and a life-buoy during the excruciating death throes of said relationship eighteen months later.

De Backer also appears to like a good nautical metaphor – this track’s refrain of we’ll walk the plank/with eyes wide open wouldn’t be out of place in the lyrics of ‘With This Ship’, a single from his other group The Basics. That’s just the problem though; ‘Eyes Wide Open’ sounds like a Basics track, not a Gotye track. I guess that’s the risk of dropping their Beatles schtick – without that, they’ve got the mixed blessing of a talented but disctinctive songwriter.

‘Eyes Wide Open’ hasn’t hit me like the singles from Like Drawing Blood or Boardface did. Perhaps it’ll work better in the context of an album.

You can pick yourself up a free download of this track in exchange for your email address over at www.gotye.bandcamp.com.