Robert McGinty - Reflections

​Robert McGinty

Reflections
self-released; 2025

​By Matt Jensen

With Reflections, his second full-length release of the year, Robert McGinty continues to build a world that feels both stately and strange. Following Chanson à La Lune, an album steeped in elegance and restraint, Reflections expands the palette—at first gently, and then with a sudden, almost mischievous tilt.

The album opens with its title track, a piece that announces itself with poised, deliberate piano—played with the kind of precision that conjures images of polished marble floors and ornate ceilings. “The Brightness of the Morning” follows like a natural afterthought, still buttoned-up but with a noticeable spring in its step, as if the ceremonial robes have been swapped for a morning stroll.

McGinty seems most at home in these impressionistic spaces. “Ballade à L’Amour” shimmers with softness, all elegant lines and featherlight phrasing. “The Elysian Slumber” leans into a more whimsical, dreamlike terrain, where strings drift above the piano like thought bubbles. It’s subtle, but there’s a painterly quality to the way he balances light and shadow here.

Then, the album begins to shift. “The Whisper on the Wind,” led by what sounds like a wood flute, moves like a ghost across a field—sorrowful, but unburdened. “Ebbing Tides” is one of the album’s standouts, evoking sweeping cinematic vistas with a classical gravitas that would feel at home in a mid-century French drama. Even “The Whimsical Waltz,” as frolicsome as its title suggests, keeps one foot grounded in McGinty’s meticulous sense of form.

But somewhere around “Encantada,” the floor drops out. The piano fades into the background, and in its place comes the jangling cheer of ragtime guitar. “Tales by the Campfire” continues the left turn, and by the time “The Roadrunner Does Jazz” barrels through with its manic energy, it’s clear that McGinty has thrown off the powdered wig entirely and slipped into something far less formal.

Reflections feels almost like two albums in one: the first, an ode to classical refinement; the second, a gleeful detour into ragtime and jazz-inflected play. That such a pivot doesn’t derail the experience speaks to McGinty’s peculiar charm. He makes it feel less like a disruption and more like a secret door in an old mansion—suddenly, you're not at a concert hall, you're at a speakeasy. Somehow, it works.

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