New favorite album alert!

A late addition to my albums of the year: Gotye's Making Mirrors. If you put Steve Winwood, Beck and early Phil Collins into a blender you might come up with something similar to this second album from Australian singer/instrumentalist Wouter De Backer. I'd never heard of him before, but this album is easily and immediately one of my top three favorite records of 2011, mixing 60s soul, ska and eighties pop for a series of full-tilt, aerodynamic pop belters — notably I Feel Better, In Your Light and Somebody That I Used to Know — which achieve near vertical lift-off. B+