R53A The Dusty Mirror (2020 Version)
Mark Sheeky
2020

Track listing

1. Since You Kicked Me Out (03:07)
2. Except for the Hatred (04:27)
3. The Escape Angels (02:55)
4. Fear of the Thing Itself (03:43)
5. Warm Comfy Sofa (02:01)
6. Norman Bates (04:45)
7. Two Parents of a Child (02:16)
8. The Arm (02:35)
9. Moments of Terror When Falling Asleep (03:40)
10. Falling Apart Again (02:24)
11. The Fingers of Evil (04:59)
12. Cherries (02:07)

About this album

The Dusty Mirror is an album of songs suffused with the power of the unconscious. The album is approximately in three parts. The energy of the first two tracks breaks into a hint of something different with The Escape Angels, which, like The Fingers of Evil was written as a visual-stream of consciousness, a journey of image to image to image, with an instantaneous linkage between the image, emotion, and sound which relates these tracks to my instrumental albums. Despite being a collection of separate songs, the album is treated as a whole, a unity, not a collection of single tracks.

Fear of the Thing Itself, a track about the artist Richard Dadd, is related by murder to Norman Bates, and the four tracks of this section were written in 2011, 2011, 2014, and 2009 respectively. Mark thought that these songs deserved an outing, and a key motivation for this album was his revival in songs.

The Dusty Mirror is as musically and lyrically complex as anything Sheeky had created before, and features his first guitar solo work in the edgy track about social dysfunction, Moments of Terror When Falling Asleep, and more amusingly with harmonica in The Arm, a surrealistic song about a lonely severed limb. It is perhaps the contrast of light and darkness than unifies this album.

The Dusty Mirror was the first in a line of vocal albums, developed partly as training for production of a new type of music. The album was remastered and partly re-recorded with new technology for a new release in 2025.